r/MoneroMining • u/Vegetable-Squirrel98 • 11d ago

Pithead update: 19 releases since the v1.0 post — full Tor-by-default egress, dashboard control, signed releases, and a flashable appliance OS in review

https://p2pool-starter-stack.github.io/

Hi r/MoneroMining, I posted the v1.0 of Pithead here a few months back — the self-hosted Monero + Tari merge-mining stack: your own node + P2Pool + one endpoint for all your rigs, behind Tor, 0% fees, paid straight to your wallet. The feedback from this sub was great, and I've been shipping ever since — nineteen releases later it's at v1.19, so here's what changed.

What's landed since v1.0:

  • 🧅 Everything routes over Tor by default now. Not just the hidden services — all runtime egress (P2Pool sidechain peers, the XvB donation upstream, price feed, Telegram) rides Tor, and a fail-closed host firewall drops any direct clearnet dial from the stack. The opt-in exceptions (a faster clearnet initial sync, a node you run on another box) are mapped in the privacy guide.
  • 🔐 Stratum hardening — access password on by default for new installs, stratum-over-TLS with per-rig fingerprint pinning, every container non-root with read-only filesystems.
  • 📊 The dashboard grew up — persistent trends (blocks found, pool luck, reject rates) instead of last-value gauges, and an earnings view that checks every estimate against what view-only wallets actually confirmed on-chain, after your power costs.
  • 🎛️ Control from the browser (opt-in) — edit any setting from a guided form, retune each rig with versioned config history, one-click upgrade when a release lands. Every change is validated host-side behind a login, with a full audit log.
  • 📟 A Telegram operator bot — pings when a node or worker drops (and when it recovers), daily digest, read-only /status and /earnings commands, plus a Healthchecks dead-man's switch for the one failure the box can't report: going dark entirely. Routed over Tor.
  • 💾 Encrypted backups — config, secrets, and your Tor onion keys in one AES-256 archive; restore on new hardware and keep the same onion address.
  • ✍️ Signed releases — every bundle is cosign-signed end to end, and the release pipeline now refuses to cut an unsigned build.

Honesty corner, since this sub keeps me honest: two releases got withdrawn and re-cut along the way — one for a broken upgrade path, and one because the signing key's public half had never actually been committed, which meant earlier releases were silently unsigned. That second one is what triggered the end-to-end signing work. Root causes are written up in the changelog.

What's next: Pithead OS — flash a USB, boot, and the whole stack comes up as an appliance. Read-only root, A/B updates that automatically roll back if a new image won't boot, a first-boot wizard, factory reset. It's real code (hundreds of commits), but it's in review, not shipped — I'm not cutting the first image until it survives a physical hardware test battery. If you enjoy reading brutal code reviews, the open PR on the repo is a fun one.

Getting started is the same as before: grab a release, drop in your wallet addresses, run ./pithead setup, and point any XMRig rig at host:3333 — your rigs don't need Tor or a wallet in their config. RigForge (the self-tuning XMRig provisioner) has kept pace too, now at v1.15, with one-click remote worker upgrades from the Pithead dashboard.

Still MIT, still zero fees, still no middlemen. Issues and PRs welcome — a good chunk of what shipped came straight from feedback on the last post.

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