How to Mining Monero Cryptocurrency On Your VPS?

In this lab, we will try mining Monero, the de-centralizing cryptocurrency on our Ubuntu 20.04LTS VPS, CPU mining, using XMRig, the open-source miner.

We will start by:

• Update Our Ubuntu VPS/Server
• Building and Install The XMRig Miner
• Create Our Monero Cryptocurrency Wallet
• Configure the miner and start mining Monero

Step1: Update Ubuntu 20.04LTS VPS/Server

If you are not root, switch to the root shell by using sudo -i

# apt update
# apt upgrade

Install Pre-Requested Package

As we will build our crypto mining software from the source, we need to make sure our Ubuntu is ready as a development environment and install the following packages.

Make sure all Linux required headers are ready

# apt install linux-headers-$(uname -r) -y

Make sure all of the Build-Essential development libraries and tools are installed

# apt install build-essential
# apt install git cmake libuv1-dev libssl-dev libhwloc-dev

Step2: Building And Installing XMRig The Cryptocurrency Miner

XMRig is a CPU/GPU miner, but as always VPS resources are limited so we will use XMRing CPU miner mode.

Clone XMRig Project

# git clone https://github.com/xmrig/xmrig.git

Building XMRing from source

# mkdir xmrig/build && cd xmrig/build
# cmake ..
# make -j$(nproc)

After the building process is completed successfully, you will find the  xmrig  executable miner binary file located at the same directory xmrig/build that we created while building in the above command.

Step3: Creating Our Monero Wallet

We can use MyMonero as our simple Monero cryptocurrency wallet, we will use the web-wallet version, and create a new one by this URL, then press the create a new button, then follow up the wallet creating process.

Now we have our Monero wallet address which we can use to keep Monero.

42WMDKmVzrKW5b4rbd9tvHjJr4o6Tr3EA2pE7R8zFHE1d6P7n7HB7wrCZHDUeyauMLhwzpPkBiw6gRWCwgTxFZqAUKkTh7P

Step4: Configure The XMRig Miner

We can create the XMRig JSON configuration file using the XMRing configuration wizard, start with pressing the + New configuration button

While configuration wizard we will need to Add Pool: we can optionally select the HashVault.Pro and pass our Monero wallet address to it

Now go to the Result tab to get the JSON configuration file contents:

PS: We can less/ignore the donation percentage by going to the Misc tab, then set the value to 1 or delete the donation “donate-level”: 5, the line from the output configuration JSON File.

The output JSON configuration will be

{
    "autosave": true,
    "donate-level": 5,
    "cpu": true,
    "opencl": false,
    "cuda": false,
    "pools": [
        {
            "url": "pool.hashvault.pro:443",
            "user": "42WMDKmVzrKW5b4rbd9tvHjJr4o6Tr3EA2pE7R8zFHE1d6P7n7HB7wrCZHDUeyauMLhwzpPkBiw6gRWCwgTxFZqAUKkTh7P",
            "keepalive": true,
            "tls": true
        }
    ]
}

Of course, do not forget to replace the Monero wallet address with yours.

Now you can create your JSON Config  config.json  with the above content to pass to the XMRig.

Step5: Start Mining Monero

We can start mining Monero using the XMRig directly, pass the wallet address and the mining pool to the miner as the following

# ./xmrig -o pool.hashvault.pro:443 -u 42WMDKmVzrKW5b4rbd9tvHjJr4o6Tr3EA2pE7R8zFHE1d6P7n7HB7wrCZHDUeyauMLhwzpPkBiw6gRWCwgTxFZqAUKkTh7P -k --tls

, or using the above configuration files that we created in the previous step as the following

# ./xmrig -c config.json

To see full XMRig command options please check the URL

Step6: Tracking Our Mining State

As we are involved in the HashVault pool, we can monitor and Track our wallet address live state from the  HashVault Dashboard URL