Data Networking for Medium Size Bitcoin Mining Operations

hey guys Rolf here with block operations he talks more about things that you need to know when you're running a Bitcoin mining facility or a pointer whatever your mind in these days today I want to talk about data networking so data networking is so that I think grant I've been doing it for many years the last business I had was with the it networking company it was a Cisco Gold Partner that I've started sold it a couple years ago so it can be pretty complex the people that you talk to can make it even more complex but the data networking that you need for a mining facility is not that complex so let's go through the different elements and give you at least an overview of it and so that when you talk with the network specialist you have some realm of common points for discussion all right let's start out with coming from the outside in you have two big old internet here and that's what you're connecting to everybody else on wave Bitcoin works is there's a bunch of nodes out there they all talk with each other and they figure out you know who gets the next set of transactions so you're going to connect your miners to a mining pool and we're going to assume for now since we're talking mostly Bitcoin that this is a mining pool that somebody else runs so you need to protect to it quickly but there's differences between even the basic conductivity terms of quickly and let's talk through that a little bit a bit of experience with data networks the company I don't previous liiike app network systems a big thing that we did was we worked with public sector organizations like colleges universities and cities and counties good times businesses to upgrade their local area network to upgrade their network security or servers their storage their Wi-Fi in a lot of cases employ an entire city go home system over that network so this is anywhere from fifty to five thousand users so I'd give retail all this but I don't want to because there's really no reason to but one of the big things that people often confuse and they say I want to get to the internet elected my minor is talking to the mining pools quickly and so I need a lot of family it was not really what you need what you need is low latency so the their blades he comes from a bunch of different things mostly it comes from just distance so electricity and going through the different switching paths it takes time over distance but it can also happen when things stack up at choke points so if you get internet from your local cable company or somebody like that so often over subscribe so they'll bring in there'll be lots more users that are trying to get access to the Internet than they want so during through the path of the cable they'll simply choke points where your information slows down so a lot of cases when you buy more bandwidth even though you don't use all the bandwidth it kind of frees up those choke points so if you do get more bandwidth you can oftentimes reduce your latency minutes so overall the latency that you want to reduce in fact some of the lowest latency connections can be very low bandwidth so those are the major things that you want to talk about when you're purchasing your internet from the internet provider so you don't need a huge pipe it just needs to be low latency unfortunately the most consumer great it won't give you a service level agreement for latency and of how we get bandwidth anyway you bring network in to your location and they'll provide some kind of router promoter now that could be a complete router and modem with a firewall and Wi-Fi and everything like that I like using the cable companies Wi-Fi and firewall so in a lot of cases I'll turn off the Wi-Fi because other people sometimes can connect to it you know cable program and then all port forward the outside interface and I'll take that outside interface and port forward it to my firewall so three importance that you own your own firewall because there's a number of different things that you can do with it the firewall but I like this it's an enterprise create firewall it's actually a Cisco Meraki about $500 firewall now I get the three-year high-end security license on it because it's got the best intrusion prevention and the business it also includes MIMO Wi-Fi and one thing that I really like is that you can not only get an internet connection on it but you can take one of these landforms and turn it into a second internet connection so that if you lose your primary internet connection it flits over the second internet connection and you can even put a cell phone modem in here as a third way of getting to the Internet so this is a great this is a great firewall you can remote access VPN to it you can do all sorts of different things with it and the best thing is is cloud control so when I'm at home I can see everything on my firewall by going to rocky disco calm and logging into my firewalls and see everything that's going on I can configure them I can do all sorts of different things so that is one thing that I recommend that you never skimp on is a really good firewall so I think the model these days is like the MX 60 or Wireless with a three-year security package there's like a low security a high security package definitely get that because that that lets you go to a second internet provider like I got comcast cable and then I got a second one from AT&T my other office I couldn't get any AT&T so I did a cell phone modem here and that's my backup and you really need to have backup because your internet will go down and you don't want all your miners to stop mining just because your primary it I've got it went down you need your secondary Internet running as well so that's the big thing on the firewall then inside that you have what's called local area network on the land and this is all network switches you can end up having a lot of different network switches so this is what they look like this is a Meraki 24 port network switch now as much as I like barrace Roxy switches for your purposes we're going to be overpriced let me draw out kind of what you're gonna want for a local area network okay so here's our unit connection and connected through the routers for our firewall and we want to talk about these network switches and about how we're getting to the IP addressing of the organization and talk about IP addressing a little bit let's talk about the physical network switches first you really don't need to get expensive switches the the data rates that we're talking about since everything goes to the internet and nothing is actually done internally your limiting factor is going to actually be your internet pipe now the inner pipe that I got is like 50 megabits per second and I use a lot less so I buy old use switches that are 100 Meg switches like this versus second I'm not going to explain negatives for a second right now but a lot of times people think okay I need the fastest network switches that are out there I need gigabit switches so you know 1000 megabits per second but 1,000 megabit per second just in to connect to the switcher that doesn't mean it's going to get us the in at that speed you're limited by your internet connection so you can get the less expensive hundred megabits connections now is just a prize and I thought you can get you know 24-port switches for $200 or so for links it's you know what those are pretty good those are all you really need I prefer to get 48 ports switches just because it gives you a little bit more flexibility but not not really a big deal we're talking about wraps we're talking about racks and our typical setup where we have 24 miners interact we stick a 24-port switch on there that's great as well you know maybe if it doesn't come with 2 or 4 out links then you just take 22 miners on that what you want to do is set up some kind of redundancy depending on the level of the size of your operation and what it's going to cost you to have it down day kind of gives you a figure for what you want to pay for redundancy you can even set up a Meraki firewall I'm not sure if the tall one will do it so if it can be done as a failover that's a little bit more complex you might want to prefer just having an in-place stair like I got an old Meraki firewall that I could plug in to fire up pretty quickly so we even have to get one but you do want to assume that network cables or the porch that they're plugged into can fail so standard network topology it talks about a core and distribution layer and that's kind of what we're building and then an access layer an access layer is where the access devices plug into it so assuming that all these are a switch that's on top of a rack what we'd like to do is connect the switches so there aren't multiple hops it's tempting sometimes to connect one switch to another to another to another if you don't really want to do that because if the information has to hop from one switch to another and then if any one switch fails in this case then all the other switches drop off it as well you don't really want that so the way you want to physically connect the network cables is to connect them to the distribution layer so connect these guys to the distribution layer here and then also connect them to the distribution layer here the network switches have something that'll shut down the port and prevent loops called spanning tree protocol also just have it turned on automatically so you don't really have to worry about it but that way these ports so you can see the distribution switches get kind of busy if there are 48 ports switches that you gotta know switches on top of the rack in a lot of cases you're going to have dedicated switches as your distribution switches now this type of network topology is really expandable and it's reliable and it's the type of setup that you need so within that let's talk about IP addresses if you want to learn about IP addressing I'm sure those there's a lot of good YouTube videos and other things like that the basic industry standard for understanding that stuff is the cisco certified network associate so if you go do some googling around on how to get your cisco certified network associate or the prep for that they'll go through and explain all the IP addressing and different things like that that you need and if you're going to contract with someone it'd be a good idea my personal opinion to work with someone that works at a local cisco service provider others certifications beyond the CCNA their CCNA which is a associate there's a design associate and there's the CC dt and a ccnp is a design professional and network professional these are really folks that you'll want to hire if you're going to hire to do some work on your system above that the VCA to survive internet working experts these guys tend to be fairly expensive they're very knowledgeable sometimes they like to design really complex networks they're probably the deal overkill for what you're looking to do if you're going to cost higher up consultant on your network side of things let's talk about IP addressing um you get a public IP address from the internet and I just get you know I just have dynamic IP address because I'm not hosting any services out of there so they can be some kind of IP address and then I run a permanent internal IP addressing scheme internal IP address and my firewall does the network address translation so then the port address translation so all my internal devices are able to go out through that one external IP address so internal IP addressing schemes they typically come in three different numbers 192.168.1 72.1 it is and then the tent now a lot of folks they start out because they're machines default to it with a one nine two one eight one six eight IP address to the ski and I prefer to stay away from that because these tests they go from zero to 255 on each of these octet and if the network determines how many devices that you can have on it so in a lot of cases an entire network description is going to be the like 192 168 5.5 that's going to be a specific IP address of maybe a device on the network within that you're going to have a default gateway so if you can't find someone on your local network you send it in the default gateway and he'll help you out to a different network so the default gateway in a lot of cases might be one night you want to take one dot one so that's the default gateway now within here we're not talking about the subnet mask the subnet mask is very important and it's a mask that's applied to the IP addressing scheme to say okay what can change and the problem with a 1 2 1 6 8 IP addressing scheme is that in most cases your subnet mask expose have to talk about that zero which means you can have network devices that are numbered from 1 to 255 well if we're going up to 800 devices under network we don't want to get plants fancy by doing so many or things like that that's not going to work so we need to initially change our subnet mask to something that gives us more network capability so we're going to change this third octet to a 0 then all of a sudden it opens up we can do one on here we can do my long we can define as we can do 80 we can do all sorts of different things and they can all talk to each other on the low very Network so that's the first big thing make your subnet mask whatever network protocol you choose for your internal either IP addressing scheme you need to make it 255.255.0.0 for your subnet mask because not elect you have a flat network and you don't really need anything other than a black network for going up to you know thousand and two thousand sheets you're not talking to each other stuff like that there you can break things down again into different subnets and if you get above maybe a thousand devices you're going to want to do that just so there's not a lot of cross talk and chatter and things like that that's really more advanced than what we need to do here however the problem is when you go to have multiple locations with multiple locations I like to take this second octet and they set the location the location indicator so the problem is with a 192 IP address scheme you can't change that second octet that's why I always use the ten dot Network scheme because you can change each of these octet for what you need and so I'll typically make this the location indicator and then in a lot of cases just make these for the flat network so my subnet mask for my office here for example it's something like 10.8 0.0 on a slash 16 that 516 network means that we take the 16 rightmost bits and can change them so the subnet mask Amathus is 0 0 and my default gateway I like to keep things simple there's just going to be 10.8 0.1 and then I've got a lot of flexibility to play with and then if I have a second location which I do I might make that what 12 for something that in that way I don't get confused as to what location I'm on when I'm doing different things anyway that's why I advise to you is initially set up with a network mask of 255.255.0.0 private IP addressing scheme all this gets set up in your firewall and set up within your DHCP server your DHCP server DHCP stands for dynamic host configuration protocol is the hands-on IP addresses onto your device nice thing about your firewall or router or things like that is it keeps track of everybody who hands out the IP addresses - so if you give your device a name like I could give each month one of my aunt minor s9a name then when it grabs an IP address from the firewall - puts its name in there as well so I can always go to my firewall and say ok I gotta get to this specific device my number what's inside the address and now I can go to it right from there you can also reserved IP addresses although to me that's more trouble than it's worth except for very specific devices like network switches or other things like that that you always want to access because what I found is most devices these days once they grab an IP address from a DHCP server they're always going to have to be addressed and they're always going to get so they're never really going to change that but you definitely want to set up your DHCP scope that's some bling yourself you set up your IP addressing scheme with your firewall and then you set up your scope it's just hands IP addresses to everybody some of those big things on the on the network you want to have a good firewall again I'm rocky this one's even got the wireless built into it most bloodline is very secure intrusion detection system network switches you see this is 24 network force and then for up links I'll pay for little things to stick into there because I'll figure out even need to uplink than 100 megabits per second and the Wi-Fi that's built-in and if you start getting bigger than a thousand and fifteen hundred devices then you want to talk to a network guy about self getting the network so that there isn't any so there's a lot of broadcast traffic anyway so that's a big thing on that's pretty much most things are in for data networking for mining operations you can ask questions just like oh it definitely a question on YouTube or asking on my website you can see me on the different forums and stuff like that I've got a pretty consistent ID block off have a great day Thanks

Channel: Block Operations

Views: 17,313

Keywords: bitcoin, zcash, mining

Id: QnHY5owtkHA

Length: 20min 35sec (1235 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 18 2017