Dark Coin
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I hate to sound like a noob but what is Dark Coin and coin mining? I want to at least know the basics and possible security issues be for I enable this setting. I’m sure others are wondering the same.
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Basically it’s a way of donating to the project.
while your system is imaging it tried to mine darkcoins… this contributes to making some very tiny amount of money for the project.
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As VincentJ stated, Darkcoin is a cryptocurrency that the particular coin “mined” is a bitcoin. Well, to be exact, as many bitcoins, as possible. It’s a means to donate to the FOGProject without contributing real cash.
The current setup makes it so it mines under 3 fairly specific conditions.
1.) The mining operation is enabled within the FOG GUI. It can be found under FOG Configuration->FOG Settings->General Settings->FOG_MINING_ENABLE. Make sure the checkbox is checked, if it is, Step 1 is complete. It defaults to Off.
2.) If mining is enabled, does the system have more than one core available? If there’s 2 or more processors or cores on the system awesome. If there’s only 1 core to the system mining will not happen.
3.) If mining is enabled, and there’s more than 1 core available on the system, is the architecture type x86_64. If all three of these conditions are met, mining will start.Technically there’s a fourth element that’s needed. That’s that it is an imaging task. So it only runs if mining is enabled, there’s more than one core, it’s 64 bit architecture, AND it’s an imaging task whether download or upload.
The port it sends the data on is tcp port 3333, to drkpool.com under a specified user that helps contribute to the FOGProject’s user.
So for firewalls, the only port you need open to the outside world (if you’re blocking ports outbound) is 3333 on the TCP side. You don’t need to open an ports for it to download any data. That’s it. So the only “security” concerns would be outgoing data, not incoming data.
Hopefully this helps explain it.
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Thanks for the update Tom. I would be glad to turn this option on knowing that the mining only occurs under the listed conditions and there shouldn’t be much of an issue of security.
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Hi,
A couple of questions and a possible problem.
Is there a way to check how the miner is going on the client, and how can we check how much money has been donated (as a whole for everyones mining to the project)
I found a task under the advance task menu to start a client mining for darkcoins but the default is to blank the screen to save power so you cannot see what is happening (or to see if there are any errors)
So I tried running the client manually by downloading the fogpackage.zip and unzipping it into a directory. Problem is that it could not connect to the configured server just keeps saying “time out connecting to server, retry in 30 seconds” doing a bit of digging (pun not intended
) on the darkcointalk.org forum, the pool the client is configured for ( I think drkpool.com ) is closed.If someone else could have a look (I’ll be trying it again to make sure it wasn’t just a network problem at my end) I would hate that any work people are doing to run the donate task while imaging a disk is for nothing.
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Right now, drkpool website is no longer server. Chuck is working to rebuild the fogpackage.zip project with the new information.
