Commissioning a New Miner

Receiving and inspection

Before anything gets racked, inspect it. Shipping damage and factory faults are cheapest to catch on the floor, not after a machine is bolted in a hot aisle. Match the box to the model you were told to install, and confirm the PSU that ships with (or matches) that model is the right one before you touch power.

• Check the carton and chassis for crushing, punctures, or a rattling sound (a loose heatsink or fan).
• Confirm the model and hashrate class on the label match the work order and the slot it is going into.
• Verify the serial number and record it against the rack/row position for your asset tracker.
• Look at the fans, the Ethernet port, and the control board for shipping damage or bent pins.
• Let a cold-shipped unit acclimate before powering; condensation on cold boards in a warm room invites shorts.

Mounting and racking

Seat the miner in its slot so airflow goes the way the room is built for. In a hyperscale hall the machines pull cold air from the cold aisle and dump hot air into the hot aisle; a unit installed backwards recirculates its own exhaust and throttles. Make sure it is physically secure and not blocking a neighbor's intake.

• Orient intake to the cold aisle and exhaust to the hot aisle; never let exhaust feed another machine's intake.
• Seat it fully on the shelf/rail so it cannot vibrate loose; leave the vents clear.
• Keep power and network cables dressed out of the fan paths and airflow.
• For hydro/immersion units, mount to the manifold and confirm the loop or tank is ready before any power.

Power connection and the right PSU per model

Match the power supply to the exact model and generation, then connect it correctly. This is the single most common way a new install goes wrong. Antminers use a separate PSU brick whose DC cables must land on every hashboard AND the control board; if one board's cable is loose or missing you get a low board-count and low hashrate. Most Whatsminers and Avalons integrate the PSU in the chassis, so you feed AC straight to the unit. Never guess voltage.

Network cabling

Run a good Ethernet drop from the miner's RJ45 port to the switch. The miner ships expecting DHCP, so the drop has to reach a switch/router that hands out addresses on the mining VLAN. A dead drop or a segment with no DHCP server is the number-one reason a fresh miner 'has no IP.'

• Use Cat5e or Cat6 from the miner's RJ45 to the switch port; confirm the link light.
• Make sure the port is on the correct VLAN and that a DHCP server is serving that segment.
• Keep the cable out of the fan exhaust and label both ends to the rack position.

Power-on sequence

Bring it up in order so you can tell a power fault from a network fault from a heat fault.

1. Confirm the PSU/model match and that DC cables (Antminer) or AC (Whatsminer/Avalon) are fully seated.
2. For hydro or immersion, confirm coolant is flowing / the tank is filled BEFORE applying power.
3. Energize the circuit and power the miner; watch that the fans spin up and the status LED comes alive.
4. Give it a few minutes to boot the control board and initialize the hashboards.
5. Confirm the Ethernet link light before you go hunting for the IP.

Finding the IP (per maker)

Every maker ships on DHCP, but each gives you a different way to learn the address it grabbed. Know the method for the box in front of you.

Log in and change the default credentials

Every one of these ships with a published default login. A miner sitting on the network with factory credentials is an open door for someone to redirect your hashrate to their own wallet. Change the password before you do anything else, then set the pool.

Set the pool

Point the miner at your pool so its shares count. Most makers give you three pool slots: a primary and two failovers. Fill all three so a pool outage doesn't idle the machine. The worker name is how the pool tells your machines apart on the dashboard.

• Pool / URL: the stratum endpoint, e.g. stratum+tcp://pool.address:port (common ports are 3333 or similar per pool).
• Worker: the format is subaccount.workername (for example antminer.rack12row3); make it map to the physical slot.
• Password: usually doesn't matter; leave blank or use x / 123.
• Enter the same three pools in the same order across the fleet, then Save & Apply.

Verify it reaches nameplate

Don't call it commissioned until it's actually hashing at spec and the pool sees it. A fresh miner ramps for several minutes while the boards initialize and the firmware auto-tunes, so the first reading will be low. Give it time, then confirm the real numbers.

1. Wait 3-10+ minutes for all hashboards to initialize and the tuner to settle.
2. On the miner's dashboard, confirm the pool status shows Alive/Active and accepted shares are climbing.
3. Confirm the 5-minute/average hashrate is close to the model's nameplate, with all hashboards and all fans present.
4. Check board temps and fan speeds are in normal range, then log the unit as commissioned against its rack position.

First-boot checklist: common issues

The failures you see on a fresh install cluster into a handful of causes. Work them in this order.

Commissioning a whole row at scale

Racking one miner is a checklist; racking a row is a workflow. Fleet software discovers everything you just plugged in by scanning the IP range, so you don't chase addresses one machine at a time. Foreman's Pickaxe agent, for example, runs on the local network and you point it at your subnet with Find Miners to auto-detect model, status, and hashrate for the whole batch; a recurring resync then keeps picking up new units as you rack them. Braiins, Awesome Miner, and minerstat do the same kind of network scan and let you push credentials, pools, and firmware to the batch instead of typing them per box.

• Discover: scan the IP range so every newly cabled miner is found and identified automatically.
• Standardize: push the site password and the three-pool config to the batch, not per machine.
• Name: apply worker names that encode rack/row so dead workers map to a physical spot.
• Verify: use the fleet dashboard to confirm the whole row is Alive and at nameplate before signing off the commission.