Is my farm healthy? (*NIX and Linux Headless Edition)

Alot of smaller farmers are concerned about the health of their farm when they can't find any proofs for days at a time. This document was created to provide metrics to smaller farmers so they can ensure their farm is working, even without finding any proofs.

Check if your farm thinks its farming

Before going further, please make sure wether your farm actually considers itself to be farming. Theres a good chance that you might not since you are still syncing blocks.

To check the status of your farm, ../activate as usual and then type chia farm summary. If the first line of the ouput looks like like this:

Farming status: Farming

..then you know no broader errors have occured.

Change the log level output

To get detailed information about how your farm operates, you need to set the log-level of your farmer to INFO. For this you need to edit the Chia config under ~/.chia/mainnet/config. You are looking for a part of the file that looks like this:

farmer:
  logging: &id001
    log_filename: log/debug.log
    log_level: INFO
    log_stdout: false

If log_level has any other value than INFO, change it to INFO accordingly and save the file.

Check if your plots are passing the filter

The most important metric to look out for is, wether your plots are passing the plot filter on your harvesting machines. In a usual setup, this involves checking the logs under ~/.chia/mainnet/log to see if at least for some rounds, plots are marked as eligible for farming by the harvester.

Your ~/.chia/mainnet/log directory may look like this:

[email protected]:~/.chia/mainnet/log$ tree
.
├── debug.log
├── debug.log.1
├── debug.log.2
├── debug.log.3
├── debug.log.4
├── debug.log.5
├── debug.log.6
└── debug.log.7

0 directories, 8 files

Each logfile contains log information about all the services ran by Chia. If you're running a full node, these can be convoluted. We're only interested wether or not plots pass the plot filter. We can check this, by running a command like:

cat debug.log | grep "[0-9] plots were eligible for farming"

cat is a *nix program to get content of a file. With the pipe operator |we "pipe" the output to another program called grepwhich can filter textual input. We filter for "[0-9] plots were eligible for farming" to see if we already had eligible plots.

Example output may look like this:

09:55:43.847 harvester src.harvester.harvester : INFO     1 plots were eligible for farming 2d8b1c58a0... Found 0 proofs. Time: 0.13772 s. Total 100 plots
09:55:52.737 harvester src.harvester.harvester : INFO     3 plots were eligible for farming 2d8b1c58a0... Found 0 proofs. Time: 0.43679 s. Total 100 plots
09:56:01.646 harvester src.harvester.harvester : INFO     2 plots were eligible for farming 2d8b1c58a0... Found 0 proofs. Time: 0.14055 s. Total 100 plots

If you are seeing output like above here, this is already good!

It means that plots are passing the plot filter and your farm seems to work as intended. Do this for each logfile to see wether or not you had any outages or wether something went wrong.

Checking for proofs

If you have had elligible plots in the past, theres a chance that you might have already found a proof, but it didn't get accepted by the network.

Please keep in mind that finding a proof does not constitute to winning a plot (getting a payout). Even if you find a proof, it needs to compete with other proofs and win to actually receive a reward.

To check wether you have already found proofs, you can run the same command as before, but with a different filter:

cat debug.log | grep "Found [1-9] proofs"

A possible result may look like this:

12:30:01.492 harvester src.harvester.harvester : INFO     1 plots were eligible for farming 23d3a7c90f... Found 1 proofs. Time: 0.57000 s. Total 100 plots

If you do this for all your logfiles and get a result, great! This means your farm is 100% working as expected. You might not have won a block yet, but you already came very close once, or a few times!

Can a Double NAT scenario impact my farms ability to send valid proofs to the network?

Yes and no. Double NAT, while quirky, should work due to Chias uPnP support. You likely won't be able to seed blocks to other nodes this way though. A "Double NAT" scenario occurs, when a client (harvester or node) is inside a network that is NAT'ed two times. It usually involves a client being behind two routers, instead of one and looks like this:

Internet --> Router --> Router --> Client

Certain networking setups can impact the full nodes ability to participate in farming. As long as there aren't any telling signs in the logs that farming isn't working (namely logs with ERROR, WARNING tags that are network related) its unlikely that this is the case.