Dead vs Offline vs No-Pool

Three states, three root causes

Dead, offline, and no-pool all look the same on a dashboard: a miner not earning. The root cause is different for each. Name the state right before you touch anything.

Reachable or not splits the field

The first fork is simple: can you open the miner's own web UI or pull an IP-report? That one answer sorts most tickets.

• Reachable and a board reads 0 -> dead. Hardware call: board or PSU, not the network.
• Not reachable at all -> offline. The miner may be hashing fine; your path to it is broken. Fix the link, do not RMA the board.
• Reachable and hashing but zero accepted shares -> pool disconnected. The miner works; the road to the pool is blocked.

Walk a no-pool / offline fault by layer

Do not jump to the pool or the hardware. Localize the break one layer at a time, lowest layer first.

1. NIC + switch port: link light on both ends, cable seated, correct port. No link, and nothing above it matters.
2. IP / gateway / DNS: miner has a valid IP, reaches its gateway, and resolves the pool hostname. A bad gateway or dead DNS looks identical to a dead pool.
3. Firewall / egress: the stratum port is open outbound - often 3333, or 443 for TLS/encrypted stratum. A blocked egress port stops shares cold.
4. Pool status: only after your side checks out, load the pool's own status page. The outage may not be yours.

What clearing each layer tells you

Every layer that checks out narrows the fault to what is left above it.