Getting Started with Hive OS — Worker Installation and Setup

7 min readAug 14, 2018

Hive OS is an all-in-one monitoring and management tool for your mining rigs. Whether its a single rig or several thousands, you and your team can easily manage them all from a single dashboard.

In this article we’ll walk you through the first time installation process and explain what different installation types there are and how to easily set up your rigs and connecting them to your account dashboard.

Creating An Account

Before installing Hive OS on your rig, we recommend creating an account first, or logging into your existing one. Make sure to create a secure password.

We strongly suggest setting up Two Factor Authentication (2FA) for additional account security. You can find these settings by clicking on your user name in the top right corner and then going to the Account tab. Scroll down to the Two-factor Authentication option and switch 2FA on then follow the onscreen instructions carefully.

Adding Your Workers

As soon as you’re done setting up your account, it’s time to connect your rigs to the dashboard. GPU rigs and ASICs are uniformly referred to as workers. You will have two options of connecting your workers, via Farm Hash or via manual setup. Farm Hash is used for connecting your workers to a Farm without pre-creating the rig in the dashboard. This is our new and fast method of connecting a worker to a Farm, so we recommend this setup method for most users. We will go into more details on Farms and how to use them in our next articles.

1. Farm Hash

Each Farm has its unique Farm Hash. You can find your Farm Hash by going to your Farm’s Settings tab. Once you write the installation image, you may then add your FARM_HASH to the rig.conf file which you will find in the root folder of the image. We’ll explain this step in detail below.

Farm Hash can be effectively used with Hive Flasher for bulk rig installations. More details on Hive Flasher are available here.

2. Manual Setup

Users that have previously used Hive OS will be familiar with this option of connecting their worker to the dashboard. It involves using a rig ID and a password for each miner to be configured. Although it’s a bit more tedious than connecting workers via Farm Hash, we left it for our old school users’ convenience.

Click on the plus in the top right corner and choose Add Worker option.

A window, Add New Worker, will pop up with the following fields:

Choose between GPU or ASIC type.
Name — your rig name. This can be anything. For example, rig01; garage_rig; etc. or leave it blank.
Password — your miner’s password. You can enter a convenient password for you, or generate one by clicking the double arrow button instead.
Tags — custom tags to help you logically separate projects by filters for various farms and workers. Tags can be created by going to the Settings tab.
Description — your rigs description. This is for your convenience only. For Example: The rig at my parent’s garage; Store room rig; Rig on Park St. 251, that I only use for mining Monero; etc.
Once done, click the Add button.

You will now see your rig added to the list of workers, but first you will need your rig ID. After you pre-created your worker, you will be forwarded to the worker’s dashboard. Go to the worker’s Settings tab and you should see the rig ID and the Password.

The ID of the rig and the password will be needed during the initial installation and first boot, in case you opted for this option instead of Farm Hash, so we recommend writing it down.

Choosing An Installation Type

Hive OS can be installed on both GPU rigs and ASICs as well.
Below we will describe the different types of installations:

GPU — installs the OS unto GPU based rigs
ASIC — installs the OS unto ASIC miners

Downloading The Image

Go to the download page to get the latest version of Hive OS. You can download the image from our website as a .zip file or via .torrent if you prefer. You will also have the option of downloading Hive OS for ASICs or our Bulk Installation tool.

We recommend installing the OS image to an SSD. SSDs are much more reliable and we advise using them in production environments. Because many users still prefer using a USB flash drive, we have the logs turned off by default. If you installed the OS on an SSD, you can optionally turn logging back on by running the logs-on command after installation.

Check the Flash drive, SSD, HDD forum thread for additional information and also visit our Common booting problems forum thread for more details.

GPU Installation

Writing Disk Image

You will need to write Hive OS image onto an SSD. Although many user prefer to use USB drives, we recommend opting to an SSD instead. Start by extracting the image from the .zip file first and then writing the .img file onto a drive.

Windows user can write the image using HDD Raw Copy Tool, Win32 Disk Imager, Rufus or Etcher.

MacOS and Linux users can do it with ease using Etcher, or do it manually via command line as described below.

Here’s an example of the command:
dd if=hive-xxx.img of=/dev/sdb bs=10M status=progress
But be attentive when finding out the output disk of. Use fdisk -l command to list your partitions and select the correct one.

After the image is flashed you will discover a newly created drive in your system where you will be able to pre-configure your worker with either Farm Hash or it’s ID and password. Find rig-config-example.txt on HIVE drive and open it with a .txt editor. You can use the integrated text editors on Windows, MacOS and Linux or download a free alternative. For example, Notepad++ for Windows or Sublime Text for MacOS and Linux.

Now choose one of the two options below:

Optional Step — Farm Hash

Once the image copy is complete, you can go to your drive in Windows, Linux or Mac and find rig-config-example.txt file in the root folder. Here’s how it looks:

*The contents of rig-config-example.txt file*

Enter your Farm Hash in the FARM_HASH= field by copying the value from your Settings tab. Here’s how the field should look like:

FARM_HASH=f019745da6ba65630b28ef3c92608e7022b4bf76

No need to set RIG_ID or RIG_PASSWD in this case. That’s it, just save your config file and rename it into rig.conf. Proceed by finishing the image installation and boot your worker. It will connect to the dashboard automatically.

Optional Step — Manual Setup

Once the image copy is complete, you can go to your drive in Windows, Linux or Mac and find rig-config-example.txt file in the root folder. Here’s how it looks:

Find and fill in the two fields:

RIG_PASSWD=RIG_ID=

That’s it, just save your config file and rename it into rig.conf. Proceed by finishing the image installation and boot your worker. It will connect to the dashboard automatically.

ASIC Installation

Before proceeding with installation, make sure that your ASIC miner is supported. The current list of supported models:

Antminer S9
Antminer S9i
Antminer L3+
Antminer L3++
Antminer D3
Antminer A3
Antminer T9+
Antminer Z9-Mini

Installation

Remotely connect to your worker using SSH. Visit the Teleconsole forum thread for more details. Then run the following command:

cd /tmp && curl -L --insecure -s -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/minershive/hiveos-asic/master/hive/bin/selfupgrade && sh selfupgrade

For Antminer D3 Blissz run the following command before installation:

ln -s /usr/lib/libcurl-gnutls.so.4 /usr/lib/libcurl.so.5

Promptless Installation

You can use FARM_HASH to add your ASIC workers automatically without entering rig ID and password. Copy your FARM_HASH from the Settings tab of your Farm and enter it into the command line as shown below:

cd /tmp && curl -L --insecure -s -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/minershive/hiveos-asic/master/hive/bin/selfupgrade && FARM_HASH=your_hash_from_web sh selfupgrade

Replace the your_hash_from_web with your FARM_HASH.

For more details regarding ASIC installation, please refer to this GitHub page.

Finishing Setup

As soon as your worker connects to the dashboard, you’re all done! Your worker should now be ready for you to make a few final adjustments in the dashboard, which we will describe in our next article.