I’m working on what I’m calling a bitnet. In a nutshell, it is a project to monitor and manage crypto currency mining on several remote computers I have at my disposal.

There are other projects out there that do this already, but I haven’t found any that meet my requirements or suit my fancy. What I need is managed, scheduled, crypto currency mining on computers that are only used during the day, all with no memory footprint during off-time. Plus, I could use the experience from creating something like this!

Inspiration for this project comes from tools like botnets and LOIC; a master control server tells the network of clients what to do, and when.

Disclaimer: This project is not meant to be used for evil! 

Basic Operation

Using my favorite mining pool, I create several bitcon/litecoin workers, one for each available computer. I enter those same mining pool worker names and passwords to my bitnet server web interface.

I deploy bitnet_client.exe to several of my available computers. (I will do so using FOG‘s snapin functionality.)

bitnet_client has two main parts. The miner (cgminer), and mining wrapper (autoIt script). While bitnet_client is not running, to maintain a zero memory footprint on the client computer, bitnet_client does not run in the background. Instead, once a day, the bitnet_client wrapper will be run by windows task manager. The wrapper will check in to bitnet_server and retrieve mining orders.

Here is an example of the orders bitnet_client it will receive:

{
  "mine": 1,
  "url": "http://coolminingpool.com:3333",
  "user": "ninjaface.transformer",
  "pass": "rosebud3",
  "intensity": 9,
  "worksize": 128,
  "threads": 1
}

bitnet_client mining wrapper will parse this JSON and process it into a cgminer configuration file. If the order to mine was given, the wrapper will call cgminer using the generated configuration file.

Mining! All night long!

The bitnet_client mining wrapper will end cgminer at the time designated by bitnet_server.

Each bitnet client will have unique configurations, as set in the bitnet server control panel. This will allow cgminer settings such as intensity, worksize, thread, etc. tailored to computers with varied hardware.

Yeup.

That’s the basic idea. Comments? Questions? Critique? Ideas? Optimizations? Let ’em fly!