Bitcoin difficulty calculator

Running a BitCoin server is rather easy, and should only take a few minutes to configure. Depending on the abilities of your networked computers, you could take in a few BitCoins in a shorter period of time.

For the setup I already had a couple machines with bitcoin installed. For this post I’ll be using a Windows XP machine as the server and an Ubuntu client as the miner.

You’ll need to create a file bitcoin.conf, which defines the username and password for clients to connect. This file will need to be in your Application Data folder, which was a hidden folder on my windows machine in C:\Documents and Settings\[USER]\Application Data\BitCoin. Make sure that when you create the bitcoin.conf file, that it is not really named bitcoin.conf.txt if you made it in notepad. The lines that it will need are:

RPCUSER=[username]
RPCPASSWORD=[password]

Next, I opened a port to the local network on the server machine by adding an exception to Windows firewall. I chose 8333 on this machine.

Next on the Windows machine, I want to start the Bitcoin client in server mode with the -server switch at the command line. Also needed are the RPC switches that will allow your miners to connect to the server:

C:\Program Files\BitCoin> bitcoin.exe -server -RPCALLOWIP=192.168.1.* -RPCPORT=8333

This example will start the BitCoin program, and allow it to accept JSON-RPC commands. On the miner computer, which I will be using Ubuntu with poclbm as an example, I would type the following into a terminal:

python poclbm.py -d 0 -w 128 -o [BC server's IP] -p 8333 --user=us --pass=pw

Your server should be up and mining now. If you’re getting a message about problems connecting, I would double check the port settings. If you get a message about bitcoin not connected, then check the settings of your server instance.

If you have questions just post a reply!