How to edit your conf files in PiMP the fastest and easiest way

Overview

PiMP ships with minerfarm profiles, miners, and configs for mining all the latest and popular coins. The configs are where you tell the mining software what pool to mine to, what wallet or user to pay, and what settings to use for the GPUs. Now, these configs are set very conservative for 3 reasons:

1. To provide a known-good starting point as a reference / for troubleshooting.
2. To prevent new users from harming their hardware.
3. To support the widest variety of hardware.

There are 2 kinds of miner config files: .confs (JSON config files) and .pcfg (PiMP command-line config files) For example, sgminer-gm uses .conf files (like sgminer.eth.conf), but optiminer-zcash does not, so we made a .pcfg file for optiminer-zcash (zcash-opti.pcfg).

In this article, you will see how to manage and edit your confs the easy way using PiMP.

edit command

First, open a PiMP terminal or SSH into the rig. Then you can simply issue the command edit to get a list of the confs that are available for editing. (Basically an ls /opt/confs)

editing .pcfg files

So, in this example we will edit the conf for optiminer-zcash. We will use the command: edit zcash-opti.pcfg to open the PiMP text editor. If the conf you want to edit is currently mining/running, PiMP edit will warn you that the miner is running.

You will see a lot of text, maybe the PiMP header at the top, and then you will see a pool, wallet, username and password. This is the part that you edit. In the case of opti, there are a few example pools included with PiMP. There is flypool which takes a Zcash Wallet t-address “DOT” workername as the username and “x” as the password. Then you can see an example for NiceHash, which takes a BTC address “DOT” workername as its username and “x” as the password. Suprnova is also included as an example. Simply make sure that the config options that you want do not have the COMMENT OUT (IGNORE) character “#” in front of them, and that all the rest of the pools are commented out with “#”.

FLAGS=
The .pcfg has a special place for the pools, users, and passwords to connect. We also have a place there where you can put additional command line options called FLAGS= to put them in. For example, if you wanted to specify intensity for optiminer in zcash-opti.pcfg you would: edit zcash-opti.pcfg and scroll down to the bottom. Where it says FLAGS= you can change it, to say, FLAGS=-i 4 and that would pass that along to the miner.

editing .conf files

So, in the .conf file example we will edit the conf for sgminer-eth. We will use the command: edit sgminer.eth.conf to open the PiMP text editor. If the conf you want to edit is currently mining/running, PiMP edit will warn you that the miner is running.

In this conf, it will look a little bit different than the .pcfg files. This is in JSON Syntax and so the commas, quotation marks, brackets and braces are all important and you have to be careful. You will see a pool, wallet, username and password. This is the part that you edit. In the case of sgminer.eth.conf, there are a few example pools included with PiMP. You will see in a lot of our confs that we use miningrigrentals.com as the pool. This is a special type of pool. You can replace this with your pool/username/worker, or delete it and just use one pool, whatever you like. Usually it is good to have at least 2 pools setup in case one fails while mining, it will go to the backup pool. Also, you will see as the second example pool, ethermine, which takes an eth Wallet address “DOT” workername as the username and “x” as the password. Again, watch your commas!!! But it’s okay, because PiMP will tell you if you make a syntax error on the JSON confs.

Also, you will want to tune your intensity values for Ethereum depending on your GPUs. I believe you want around xintensity 768 for the RX480, and xintensity 368 for R9 360 cards, for example.

When you’re done, use Control-X then Y and Enter to save changes, and then it will tell you that it’s Valid JSON. If not, go fix it until you have valid JSON or else the miner will not start. It should look like this:

CONFIGURING MULTIPLE GPUs in the .conf:

When you have multiple GPUs, you can specify settings for each one by using commas inside the conf file. Example: “xintensity” : “1155,1155,768,768”, would be for 4 GPUs, 2 of each type. Also, when some cards are weird about a setting and require an odd setting this comes in handy.

deleting confs (to reset them back to factory PiMP defaults)

If you want to reset your conf file back to a default, you can simply use the del command. When you have changed a file, it shows as a plain text file in /opt/confs. If you have the default, it is shown as a symbolic link to the default. Here is an example of resetting the sgminer.eth.conf back to PiMP default: