Have you ever wanted/needed to run two separate instances of a miner on your PiMP OS rig? If so, this guide will step you through how to achieve this.
As most of you may know, miners like Claymore, Pheonixminer, and Ethminer all support running AMD and nVidia GPU's at the same time. Most also know that these miners are also able to mine more than just ETH... so what do you do if you want to break up your GPU's to different pools and/or coins but still use the miner of your choice? Yep, we can just setup a second (or more) instance(s) of the miner!
The key to making this work is simply to use different .pcfg or .conf config files for each instance.
In this guide, I will step you through the process with the newly added XMRig-Proxy. Although XMRig-Proxy is not actually a miner, the steps and config are the same for any miner of your choosing.
For specific info on XMRig-Proxy check out the XMRig-Proxy guide Here.
Step 1: Add the Miner
As you can see in the picture below, I already have xmrig-proxy setup and running as Miner ID #1.
To add a second instance, we just have to add the miner again with the same pimp --add #### (where #### is the 4-digit number that corresponds to the miner profile you want) we used to add the first one.
Note: If you don't remember the 4-digit profile number, you can run pimp --add and the full list will be shown to you.
Step 2: Duplicate the Config File
At this point, we need to create our duplicate config file. Luckily for us, in the output of the last command, it tells us what default config file it is currently setup to use.
To make the duplicate config file, we just need to copy that default config file to a new file with a different name.
The command we need to use is cp with the following syntax:
cp /<path>/<orig_file_name> /<path>/<new_file_name>
The /<path>/<orig_file_name> is what we got in the last command. You can copy & paste it in or hand type it in.
The /<path>/<new_file_name> is the new path and name of the file we are going to copy. To keep things in order, I highly recommend using the exact same path as the original file. The file name can be whatever you want it to be, however, I'd suggest using a slightly modified original name. For this guide I will use the name xmrig-proxy-new.pcfg
For this guide, the command I'd use would look like this:
cp /opt/confs/xmrig-proxy.pcfg /opt/confs/xmrig-proxy-new.pcfg
To see if our new file was created, we can simply run ls on the path we used above by running ls /opt/confs
Step 3: Remove the Miner We Just Added
Okay, I'm going to be honest, this step will seem a bit counter-productive, but go with me on it. We're going to delete the miner we just added. LOL, I know.
Anyway, the main purpose of adding the miner in the first place was to get the correct config file path/name so we could duplicate it (which we just did in the previous step) and to get the path/name of the actual miner (see below image).
Once we have this info, we no longer need the miner to be active, so we need to remove it. To do this we just need to run pimp --delete # (where # is the Miner ID number assigned).
Note: If you don't remember what Miner ID number was assigned to the miner when you added it, you can check the output of the pimp --list command.
In our example, the miner we added was given Miner ID #2, so our command would look like this: pimp --delete 2 and answer Y to the prompt.
To check that the miner was removed, we can just run pimp --list again.
Step 4: Create the New Profile (Link between Miner and Config File)
Here, we are going to create the new miner profile that links the miner and our new config file together.
This is done with one command in the following syntax:
minerfarm -b /<miner_path>/<miner> -c /<config_path>/<config>
/<miner_path>/<miner> is the path and miner identified in Step 3.
/<config_path>/<config> is the path and config file we created in Step 2.
For the example we are using in this guide, the full command would look like this:
minerfarm -b /opt/miners/xmrig-proxy/xmrig-proxy -c /opt/confs/xmrig-proxy-new.pcfg
This command will inform us that a new profile has been created. We can check this new profile by running pimp --add to get a list of all available profiles.
Step 5: Add the Newly Made Profile
The last thing we need to do is to add this profile to our active miners.
This is done just like adding any other profile with the pimp --add #### command, however, this time we will use the newly created profile number. As we saw in the last step, our new profile was assigned the number 1, so our command will look like this: pimp --add 1
Running pimp --list once more will show us our new miner profile has been added to the active miners list. We can also see that this profile is setup to use our new config file.
What Now?
Well, at this point, you're probably going to want to edit that new config file and customize it to whatever pool/coin you want and assign which hardware it should use.
Important Note: Most miners are designed to use all available devices, so this means you'll need to specifically tell your miners which GPU's to use. You can't run two miners on the same piece of hardware at the same time.
Every miner is different in how you need to specify which devices to use, so be sure to check what flags you need to set in the FLAGS= section of the config files.
Other than that, everything else works like normal. All of the PiMP OS commands will work on this new (duplicate) miner. edit #, pimp --test #, pimp --stop #, pimp --debug #, etc..
Happy Mining, PiMPs!
