Cryptocurrency Miner as a Service

Time for a bit of fun!

Following on my previous post about blockchains and cryptocurrencies I thought why not use vRA to automate the deployment of a miner. For those who are not really clued in to the mining side of cryptocurrencies, there are many different mining algorithms used amongst the coins currently doing the rounds.
For example:
• Bitcoin used SHA256.
• Litecoin uses Scrypt .
• Etherium uses Ethash.
• Monero or Electroneum use Cryptonight.

There are many more but some algorithms like SHA256 and Scrypt now require specialized mining hardware known as ASIC’s (a 2w usb ASIC stick is better at mining than a top end graphics cards with these types of algorithms).

Ethash we can thank for the world wide GPU shortage and is predominantly mined with graphic cards as CPU’s do not cut it in comparison.
But there are algorithms like Cryptonight that also use GPU’s but the gap between CPU and GPU is minimal, so anyone with a computer can jump in and have a go. These are designed specifically to be ASIC resistant. Now while GPU is more cost effective as you can have 4 or more graphics cards within a single computer to mine rather than having 4 or more actual full computers doing the mining.

Today I thought why not use vRA and create a Miner as a Service, specifically Cryptonight Miner as a Service. I will be using AWS to do the deploy. I have left this very simple with 3 inputs and I download the source and compile the miner then execute in the background. I do not create a service so if the machine is rebooted it will stop mining. The idea is if it stops – destroy and re deploy.

Now this was really just me playing around but if you do the numbers with some of the cryptonight coins it is possible to make a small margin after paying AWS. While the software component will work on vSphere machine it does require internet access to download the software for github.

Also note the image you use must be configured as a vRA template to utilise software components.
Blueprint can be downloaded Here at VMware Code

1) First we have the software component with 3 inputs.

2) Now I only used one stage being install, I could have broken this up, but was more out of laziness.

Code used is below:

cd /tmp sudo yum -y install epel-release sudo yum -y remove cmake sudo yum -y install centos-release-scl git screen nano sudo yum -y install cmake3 devtoolset-4-gcc* hwloc-devel libmicrohttpd-devel openssl-devel make sudo yum -y install gcc sudo scl enable devtoolset-4 bash sudo git clone https://github.com/fireice-uk/xmr-stak-cpu.git cd xmr-stak-cpu


sudo cmake3 -DCMAKE_CXX_COMPILER=/opt/rh/devtoolset-4/root/usr/bin/g++ .

#sudo cmake3 .

sudo make
sudo cp bin/xmr-stak-cpu ./xmr-stak-cpu

sudo ./xmr-stak-cpu >> firstrun.txt
sudo chmod +x xmr-stak-cpu

sudo sed -i "s/pool.usxmrpool.com:3333/${pool}/g" config.txt

sudo sed -i "s/wallet_address\" : \"\"/wallet_address\" : \"${wallet}.${worker}\"/g" config.txt

sudo sed -i "s/pool_password\" : \"\"/pool_password\" : \"x\"/g" config.txt
sudo awk '/BEGIN/,/END/' firstrun.txt

sudo sed -i '/cpu_threads_conf/d' ./config.txt

sudo sed -i '0,/null,/ s///' config.txt

sudo sed -i '/Copy&Paste BEGIN /d' ./firstrun.txt

sudo sed -i '/Copy&Paste END /d' ./firstrun.txt

sudo tail -n +5 firstrun.txt >> config.txt

sudo sysctl -w vm.nr_hugepages=128 sudo nohup ./xmr-stak-cpu > nohup2.out 2>&1&

3) Now I create the blueprint by dragging on a CentOS AWS image that I have installed the vRA agents on and created my own AMI. This will also work on a CentOS 7 vSphere template. I follow on by dragging on the software component created earlier and set the 3 inputs to show in request.
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