I have played with cgminer bitcoin mining program for few months now. My rig is running on Windows 7, it consists of 3x7970 graphics cards and 5 icarus development boards.
Every time I tried to overclock or undervolt GPUs on any of the 7970 cards, I got crashes in AMD drivers. I got tired of babysitting the rig constantly so I decided to write my own process watchdog for it.
I wanted something that would restart cgminer everytime there is a crash, slowdown in mining activity, network outage, or unresponsive system. My watchdog needed to have minimal impact on CPU percentage and total usage time. I opted for polling periodically (every 3 minutes or so) cgminer HTTP APIs, check the hash rates, status and more importantly checking if cgminer process ifself is running and not stuck in werfault prompt that would require user input. Since my rig runs headless, my watchdog needs to detect those situations and act accordingly. Also, sockets code had to be run in non-blocking mode to handle unresponsive cgminer, OS or network outages.
After few weeks of trying and testing various, blocking cases I finally developed responsive, watchdog with minimal CPU and memory footprint. It detects the nasty cgminer crashes, hung GPUs or a general slowdown in performance. It supports remote HTTP interface to control the watchdog remotely.
My rig runs well (with an occasional cgminer crash here and there) undervolted now, consumes 740W and runs at 3850 Mh/s hashing rate.
Compiled binaries, conf, faq files can be downloaded from:
http://www.petermoss.com/akbash/
I have a short todo list: email notifications when tiggers are set, maybe a fancier HTML output etc.
Right now, the output from the http://listen_ip:listen_port/wd_cmd=status; fits perfectly on my tiny Blackberry screen so I'm quite happy with the results.
My cgminer-wdog babysits my rig when I'm away. The only issue I have that cannot be controlled from my rig is when my Internet connection/router dies, I have no way to bootstrap it from the Internet.
For that I'd probably need a wireless connection and PSU with ethernet connectivity and something to control that port to recycle power on my router/DSL link.
Anyway, if you run cgminer on Windows, you might find this program useful. Enjoy.
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