I’ve been testing PXE boot since it came out. Today I decided to use it on one of my production rigs and I got an error immediately after boot was complete:
“Error installing hive-miners-xmrig” and then no miners start, not even Phoenix miner.
I have a very particular setup on my rigs where the flight sheet has two miners running. First I have Phoenix miner for AMDs and second I have XmRig running on the CPU (have a bunch of CPUs sitting around on my rigs why not use them?). All rigs have 4GB ram.
I have been working with this setup for more than a year now and everything worked fine using USB pens to boot the rigs. However when I booted the rig using PXE this error came up. I have been trying to understand the reason for this but I can’t figure it out.
I have a hunch that ram size could be small for two miners and respective drivers?!?
So, it seems I found the problem here…
After booting from PXE Server, hiveos installs the miner that is configured in your flight sheet.
If you have only one miner configured, everything goes ok. However, if you have 2 miners configured as independent miners, the problem happens!
As the first miner gets installed, dpkg gets locked, and when hive tries to install the second miner (while the first is still being installed) an error is raised, something that looks like this:
‘Could not get lock /var/lib/dpkg/lock - open (11 Resource temporarily unavailable)’.
As hive tries to install the second miner, dpkg is locked thus raising the error above.
This behaviour shows that having 2 independent miners running on the same rig while booting from PXE is not well managed by hiveos because you can’t have 2 instances of dpkg running at the same time.
One workaround I came up with is to have 2 flight sheets. The 1st with your original config (2 miners) and a 2nd flight sheet with 1 miner only. Every time you need to boot your rigs using pxe, you move the rigs to the 2nd flight sheet (1 miner) and after they booted, you move them to the 1st flight sheet, thus starting the 2 miners.
Suggestion to hiveos team:
Please find a way to have a delayed timer between the installation of the miners so that dpkg gets unlocked when the second miner gets installed.
