I’ve seen a lot of posts lately, and even got an message or two, asking how I remotely monitor my L7. Since (as of 8/12/22) there isn’t any after-market firmware available, nor would I suggest using any while your system is under warranty, some hacks and work-arounds are needed.
First, I use VNC Server to remote into my miners. This is a great and powerful tool and there is a free version available. I run it on a variety of systems; old Windows laptop, Raspberry Pi, and even a Chromebook I bought and hacked into Linux.
That solves the remote login issue, but what about alerting you when it’s down? There’s scripts you can write that can verify pings every so often, and that will tell you if it’s alive. But what about if it’s hashing?
To solve that I look at it inversely, I want my miner to tell me it’s down, but if that’s not easily available, then I want it to tell me it’s working. So how can we do that? It’s not as hard as you might think, in fact it’s a quick and easy hack. First, this will depend on what pool you mine and what the payout interval is. For example, if you use Litecoinpool you can set a payout threshold to meet a time interval of roughly 4 hours. For Nicehash it just happens every 4-6 hours. Why is this important you might ask?
Now let’s look at your wallet. Pretty much every wallet on earth allows you to receive a notification when you receive a payment. I have a wallet that I use for mining that I have an alert set for any incoming payment. So, knowing I have a payment threshold of 0.1 LTC on Litecoin pool, for one L7 I expect a payout roughly every 5 hours. If I don’t receive a text alert every 5-6 hours from my wallet that a payment was received I can login with VNC and verify that I’m still hashing.
Is it perfect, no, but it works for me and was a quick and easy hack to make sure I don’t have to constantly login to monitor miners. I know there are better hacks, feel free to share, that’s what this community is all about!