How can I plot without downloading the blockchain AND remaining connected to the network? I have several rack mount servers which are headless, so need to be remote connected, so they are required to be on the network, however, to plot I have to start the Chia gui, which also tries to sync the blockchain. Is there a way around this? I don’t want to download the blockchain, nor start farming once the plot is done. I want to move the plots to a farming machine.
No – you can plot from the command line, you don’t need the GUI to plot. Just install the GUI (which installs the plotting tools), enter your private key, then exit out.
There’s probably a way to do this without installing the GUI at all, but that’s what I do.
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If you already have the “farm” setup elsewhere, extract the farmer key and the public pool key, then on these plotting machines run the install for chia - no need for the GUI.
Once you are ready (init and activate would be needed) then run this command:
chia plots create -t /temp/dir -d /final/dir -f farmer_key -p public_pool_key
This will generate plots based on the farmer keys and then you can move the completed plots to the farmer location and it should be able to recognize and farm them. These are the default params, you can add -b, -n etc. based on your needs.
I’ve see 2 different variations to these settings, which it didn’t make a difference to my setup but others can chime in, if they are required.
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Copy the private keys from farmer to these “harvesters” - I did this on some machines, not on others and all of them work fine. So this can be completely avoided from my experience as long you provide the farmer and public pool keys
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After the . ./activate command, I used to start the harvester, but it doesn’t seem to be required as the plots are still created and working fine with the above command.
Good luck!
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Yeah I like your approach a lot better than mine (install GUI on each machine, enter private key, then immediately exit) … then you’re not spreading the private key around to so many other machines… if that private key gets stolen by someone, you are in BIG trouble!
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