In its simplest form, chia_plot_manager bridges the gap between creating a plot and managing that plot after it has been created.

This project was designed around my desire to "farm" the Chia cryptocurrency. In my particular configuration, I have multiple plotting servers (chiaplot01, chiaplot02, etc) creating Chia plots. Once a plotting server has completed a plot, this plot then needs to be moved to a storage server (chisnas01, chianas02, etc) where it resides while being "farmed". The process of creating the plot is pretty straightforward, but the process of managing that plot once completed was more interesting. My plotting servers have the capacity to plot 150 plots a day and that is where I started to have issues.

One of those issues that I faced was the relatively slow speed at which plots could be moved from the plotting server to the storage server. The long and short of it was simple - I could not continue to plot 150 plots a day per plotter as I could not move them off the plotting server fast enough not to run out of insanely expensive NVMe drive space. Even with 10Gbe connections directly between the two devices, using mv or cp on an NFS mount was pretty slow; others suggested rsync, which was also pretty slow due to encryption. The same held true for scp. I even went so far as scrapping the ssh that came with Ubuntu 20.04 and compiling and installing High-Performance SSH from the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center. While it was faster, it did not come close to maxing out my dedicated 10Gbe link. What I did know is that the problem was not the network. Each machine was connected to a dedicated 10Gbe port on a Cisco Nexus 9000 on a dedicated data VLAN specifically for moving those plots. Iperf was able to saturate the 10Gbe link with zero problems.

Next I wanted to ensure the problem was not related to the media I copied the data to across the wire. I installed a pair of Intel P3700 PCIe NVMe drives in a strip RAID configuration and did a bunch of tests to and from that mountpoint locally and across the wire. As suspected, locally the drives performed like magic, across the wire, they performed at exactly the same speed as my spinners. Clearly the drive medium was also not the problem. It had to be the network.

I spent a lot of time playing around with all of the network settings, changing kernel parameters, turning on and off jumbo frames, and adjusting irqbalancing. In the end, some of the changes gave me marginal increases in performance but nothing really helped a lot. Then, I stated looking at the mechanism I was using to move the files again. In researching, I ran across a couple of people with the same situation, network speed on heavily loaded systems and lightly loaded networks where traditional methods of moving files around did not work for them. So they used Netcat instead.

After reading up on the pros and cons of Netcat vs rsync (which is most recommended), I decided to give it a test. I tested cp, mv, rsync, scp and HPSSH across NFS, SMB (miserable) and SSH. With the exception of SMB they all pretty much worked the same. I was getting better performance than I had been using the stock Ubuntu ssh after replacing it with the High Performance SSH and nuking encryption, but still, nothing to write home about. Then I tested Netcat. I was blown away. I went from much less than 1Gbe to peaks of 5Gbe with netcat. 100G files that had been taking 18 minutes to transfer were now transferring in 3 to 4 minutes. Even on my heavily CPU-loaded plotter, I saw transfers around 6 to 7 minutes.

It is also very interesting to note that TrueNAS utilizes netcat for replication when you tell it you want to disable encryption for replication. In researching this further and talking with some on the forums, they noted that they found it always outperformed all other transfer methods. That was enough for me to validate my decision!

Regarding plots, most folks recommend not using some RAID array to protect your plots from loss. The thought process is that if you lose a single plotting drive, no big deal; toss it in the trash and put a replacement drive in, and fill it back up with plots. Since I really like FreeNAS, I had just planned on dropping in a new FreeNAS server, throwing a bunch of nine-drive RAIDZ2 vdevs in place, and move forward. But as many pointed out, that was a LOT of wasted space for data pretty easily replaced. And space is the name of the game with Chia. So with that thought in mind, I decided to build out a JBOD as suggested by many others. The question was how to manage to get the plots onto the drives and what to do when the drives filled up.

Welcome to my project! I ended up with basically a client/client/client/server arrangement. The software on the plotting server would watch for completed plots and then send those plots (using netcat) to a NAS server. The software on the NAS server would automatically monitor all available drives in the system and place the plot where it needed to go, all on its own. As I said earlier, my job as a pilot keeps me in the air a lot and I really needed a hands off approach to make this work.

Beginning with V0.9, the software now supports multiple Harvesters/NASs across the board, both from a reporting standpoint and also from the plotter standpoint. When configured in a multi-harvester mode, the plotter will query each Harvester to find out which one has the most space and send the plot to that Harvester. I have added in network checks and if a Harvester that you have configured fails the check, you will get an immediate notification. If you are running the farm report, it will notify you on the report. If you are running version 0.98 or higher, you can check the health of your remote harvesters from any harvester properly configured by running ./drive_manager.py -hr.

Beginning in V0.94, we now fully support portable plot management as well as old style plot replacement with portable pool plots. By replacing your old plots one at a time, you maximize the number of plots you are farming. It also has a feature to fill all of your empty drive space first with your new pool plots before starting to replace your old plots. Includes a low water mark to help manage the process.

On the Plotter side (via cron):

• Monitors my -d directory for completed plots
• Determines if the plot is complete based on the size and name of the plot (currently k32 only)
• Checks to see if we are already sending a plot to a Harvester/NAS, if so, stops
• When it is clear to send, picks which plot to send and netcats it to the Harvester/NAS
• If you have configured multi-Harvester mode, picks the best Harvester based on available plot space and other parameters you set
• If you have configured for pooling, appends "portable." to the name of the plot before sending it.
• If you have configured replace_non_pool_plots on your harvester, it will ask your harvester to delete a plot to make space.
• Utilizing an ssh subprocess, starts a receiving netcat on the selected Harvester/NAS
• After the transfer is complete, checks the exact file size of the plot on both systems as a basic verification
• Once files sizes are verified, deletes the sent plot
• Supports any number of harvesters and prioritizes sending plots to the harvester with the most space available (Empty plot space + old plots to replace = total space available.
• If replacing old plots with new pool plots, above utilizes number of plot spaces available based on free space + number of old plots.

• Checks for all available plot storage drives on the system in real time (in case new ones were added)
• Based on number of plots on drives, selects the next available plot drive to receive plots
• Updates the receive script with the currently selected plot drive
• Once that drive is full, selects the next available plot drive and updates the receive script
• Complete, selectable notifications via EMail, SMS and Pushbullet about the drive change, includes some SMART drive information
• Sends a daily email report including # of drives, # of plots currently and # of plots total based on current drive storage
• Daily email also includes plot speed, total plots in last 24 hours and TiB plotting in last 24 hours
• Since notifications are already built in, will extend it to alert on drive temps and smartctl warnings
• For local plotting on Harverster/NAS (Which I do), includes a ```move_local_plots.py``` script to manage local plot movement (via cron)
• If you have configured replace_non_pool_plots, completely manages replacing old plots with new plots one-by-one.
• Includes a global UUID lookup against all harvesters. Return Harvester name and mountpoint if UUID is found.
• Eventually integrate information into Influx with a Grafana dashboard (including power monitoring via UPS)

• Checks to make sure Chia is farming (farmer_health_check.py) Reboots if necessary.
• Looks for new coins
• Once found, updates a local file showing how many Chia you have
• Emails, texts, etc. when you get a new coin with the current amount you have
• Does NOT use the block explorer, so verify!

• Ability to run quick reports to the screen (basically daily email dumped to the screen)
• Ability to send a Drive update email
• Ability to monitor drive temperatures by device and serial number
• Ability to run a `Farm Wide` report incorporating all Harvesters

This was designed and is running on Ubuntu 20.04.3 for both the Plotter and the Harvester/NAS so pretty much any linux flavor should work. Listed below are the things that I am using on both systems. The one thing to watch out for on the NAS is the version of pySMART you are using. I ran into a bug with the version (1.0) on PyPi and ended up using the version from the TrueNAS Folks. DO NOT use the version from PyPi, it won't work until patched. If you are using my install.sh script, the correct version will be installed.

I am running on Python 3.8.5 and pretty much everything else came installed with the default Ubuntu Server 20.04.3 installation. Be sure to install smartmontools apt install smartmontools as well as the following:

• Sentry-SDK - (Optional, I use it for error tracking)
• Pushbullet (0.12.0) - (Optional, used for PB notifications)
• Twilio (6.54.0) - (Optional, used for SMS notifications)
• JinJa2 (2.11.3) - (Optional, Used for Email notifications)
• ConfigParser (5.0.2) - Used for reading and updating config files
• py-SMART (0.3) - Used for reading drive information
• Natsort (7.1.1) - Used for natural sorting of drive numbers
• Sysstat - Used to monitor Disk and Network I/O Stats
• RICH - Used to generate reports

Here is a very in-depth installation document that I have started: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1T2A8NboiPVpcI9shXrXlRleXiQSZ0s0I7P-F9ssOMhM/edit?usp=sharing

UPDATE: The above Google doc is WAY out of date, install is much easier now with only a single configuration file to edit. I will make an update to this soon!

The installation of the actual scripts is pretty easy. Just clone the repo and drop it on your server. A lot of what happens is very specific to how I have my systems set up so I will explain my layout in detail along with where in the code you may need to look to make changes to fit your needs. For IN-DEPTH instructions pretty much step-by-step, take a look at the Google doc I linked to above. Again, please read the document above for very in-depth instructions.

Before we get too deep into the installation and configuration of the scripts, I want to explain how I have my servers and network set up. Everything you read or see here will be based on this network diagram. If you have multiple Harvesters, they would connect the same way the first one does. Something to note, you absolutely should separate your Harvester/NAS traffic from your plotter and that of your farmer traffic to and from your Harvesters. Failure to do so can result in link saturation during plot transfers and your main node falling offline as a result.

On all of the servers I put host entries in /etc/hosts for the INTERNAL ip address of each of the servers. I use 10Gbe connections on the back and I want all of the plots to be moved across this network. By creating a separate network (10.200.95.x/24 in my example) without a default gateway, I can guarantee the only traffic on that network is plots being moved around and nothing else.

You could have an entire discussion on network performance and the install script will offer to make some changes for you to your networking parameters if you like. What I have found is that my scripts will generally saturate a 10Gbe link without issue but once you load down your plotter and Harvesters/NAS with massive CPU, memory, and I/O tasks, you really don't get utilization of the full 10Gbe. At max CPU load, it tends to take between 4 and 7 minutes to move a plot from my plotter to my NAS. Your network may vary. This is a basic network design layout, my current network has three Plotters and seven Harvesters:

I recommend installing in /root/plot_manager. If you would like to install elsewhere that is fine, if you want to use a virtual environment, that should work as well. I have not personally tried running this outside of /root/plot_manager but so long as you have the basic directory structure under your install directory, it should work out of the box.

NOTE: farmer_health_check and coin_monitor are designed to be run from /home/chia and installed in the chia user crontab unless you are running chia as the root user! To install either of those, simply run the command below inside your /home/chia directory.

Assuming a clean install, you can try this:

git clone https://github.com/rjsears/chia_plot_manager.git && mv chia_plot_manager plot_manager && cd plot_manager && chmod +x install.sh && ./install.sh help

If you are upgrading from a previous version, simply mv plot_manager plot_manager.old and then run the command above.

My final directory structure looks like this:

/root/plot_manager
├── export
├── extras
├── logs
├── test_plots
├── utilities
└── web

Here is the directory structure I use on my plotter for my main plotting and -d drives:

/mnt
├── nvme
│   ├── drive0
│   ├── drive1
│   ├── drive2
│   └── drive3
└── ssdraid
    └── array0

The /mnt/nvme/driveX drives are used as my temp drives for plotting. These are Intel DC P4510 NVMe drives capable of running 13 to 15 plots each (based on k32 plot size). The /mnt/ssdraid/array0 is my -d drive. This is a RAID0 array of HGST 1.6TB Enterprise SSD drives. This is where the completed plots are stored before they are moved by the plot_manager.py script.

While all of my actual plotting is done as the chia user, I store all of my scripts at /root/plot_manager I do have a little bit of testing built into the script and that is what the test_plots directory is used for. I simply dd 10G of zeros into a test plot file and turn on testing in the script to test everything before going live. Eventually, I will add a lot more testing capability, but that is down the road.

Beginning with Version 0.9, I attempt to autodetect your install path automatically so there is a lot less to do in this version than in previous versions. However, you do need to make some changes in plot_manager.yaml. Most of these are pretty easy to figure out. Take a look at the file plot_manager_skel.yaml for more information and for complete instructions on how to set your configuration options.

The NAS setup is pretty unique to me but it should be pretty easy to reconfigure the script to meet other needs.
Coming from running three very large Plex systems (PBs worth), I designed my drive layout and naming so that I could at any moment just by looking at a mountpoint go pull a drive if I needed to do so.

My basic layout is a single SuperMicro storage server with a motherboard, 256GB ram, and 36 drive bays. This I call enclosure0. This is a Supermicro 847, it has 24 drive bays in front and 12 in the rear. This is my directory structure for that system:

/mnt/enclosure0
├── front
│   ├── column0
│   │   ├── drive0
│   │   ├── drive1
│   │   ├── drive2
│   │   ├── drive3
│   │   ├── drive4
│   │   └── drive5
│   ├── column1
│   │   ├── drive6
│   │   ├── drive7
│   │   ├── drive8
│   │   ├── drive9
│   │   ├── drive10
│   │   └── drive11
│   ├── column2
│   │   ├── drive12
│   │   ├── drive13
│   │   ├── drive14
│   │   ├── drive15
│   │   ├── drive16
│   │   └── drive17
│   └── column3
│       ├── drive18
│       ├── drive19
│       ├── drive20
│       ├── drive21
│       ├── drive22
│       └── drive23
└── rear
    ├── column0
    │   ├── drive24
    │   ├── drive25
    │   └── drive26
    ├── column1
    │   ├── drive27
    │   ├── drive28
    │   └── drive29
    ├── column2
    │   ├── drive30
    │   ├── drive31
    │   └── drive32
    └── column3
        ├── drive33
        ├── drive34
        └── drive35

As you can see just by looking at a mount point I can tell exactly where a drive is located in my system. In addition to that, when I add additional external drive arrays, I just do the same thing with enclosure1, enclosure2, etc and my drive_manager.py script will work with no problem. I plug in a new drive, format it XFS, mount it, add it to fstab and that's it. The script does everything else.

I am basically using psutil to get drive space information and then use that to determine where to put plots. When I call psutil I just tell it I want it to look at any device that starts with /dev/sd and any mountpoint that includes enclosure and ends with the word drive:

if p.device.startswith('/dev/sd') and p.mountpoint.startswith('/mnt/enclosure') and p.mountpoint.endswith(drive):

In this manner I will never get swap, temp, boot, home, etc. Nothing at all but my plot storage drives. In order for this to work with your setup, you would have to modify all of these lines to match your paticular configuration.

Once you have that figured out, there are just a couple of other little things that need to be set and configured. All configuration items are now stored in a central yaml configuration file located at /root/.config/plot_manager.yaml. There are instruction also located in that directory. If you upgrade to a new version, simply run the install script and it will update your configuration file to the newest settings without changing anything you currently have set.

OK, once you have everything set up, on the plotter you simply run the plot_manager.py script and if everything is setup correctly you should see something like the following:

2021-03-19 19:20:01,543 - plot_manager:92 - process_plot: DEBUG process_plot() Started
2021-03-19 19:20:01,543 - plot_manager:126 - process_control: DEBUG process_control() called with [check_status] and [0]
2021-03-19 19:20:01,543 - plot_manager:158 - process_control: DEBUG Checkfile Does Not Exist
2021-03-19 19:20:01,543 - plot_manager:74 - get_list_of_plots: DEBUG get_list_of_plots() Started
2021-03-19 19:20:01,544 - plot_manager:77 - get_list_of_plots: DEBUG plot-k32-2021-03-18-02-33-xxx.plot
2021-03-19 19:20:01,544 - plot_manager:82 - get_list_of_plots: INFO We will process this plot next: plot-k32-2021-03-18-02-33-xxx.plot
2021-03-19 19:20:01,545 - plot_manager:126 - process_control: DEBUG process_control() called with [set_status] and [start]
2021-03-19 19:20:02,228 - plot_manager:98 - process_plot: INFO Processing Plot: /mnt/ssdraid/array0/plot-k32-2021-03-18-02-33-xxx.plot
2021-03-19 19:25:00,697 - plot_manager:165 - verify_plot_move: DEBUG verify_plot_move() Started
2021-03-19 19:25:01,433 - plot_manager:171 - verify_plot_move: DEBUG Verifing: chianas01-internal: /mnt/enclosure0/front/column3/drive18/plot-k32-2021-03-18-02-33-xxx.plot
2021-03-19 19:25:02,102 - plot_manager:176 - verify_plot_move: DEBUG Remote Plot Size Reported as: 108898704182
2021-03-19 19:25:02,103 - plot_manager:178 - verify_plot_move: DEBUG Local Plot Size Reported as: 108898704182
2021-03-19 19:25:02,103 - plot_manager:101 - process_plot: INFO Plot Sizes Match, we have a good plot move!
2021-03-19 19:25:02,103 - plot_manager:126 - process_control: DEBUG process_control() called with [set_status] and [stop]
2021-03-19 19:25:03,465 - plot_manager:147 - process_control: DEBUG Remote nc kill called!
2021-03-19 19:25:06,741 - plot_manager:109 - process_plot: INFO Removing: /mnt/ssdraid/array0/plot-k32-2021-03-18-02-33-xxx.plot

This tells you that everything has gone smoothly. You should be able to log into your NAS and verify that the plot is where it is supposed to be. Needless to say I would stick with a bunch of test plots until I had it right, I would also comment out this line:

os.remove(plot_path)

Until you are absolutely certain it is running the way that you would like it to run!

Now on the NAS server, I run my script once per minute. This is what you should see if everything is going well:

drive_manager:258 - update_receive_plot: DEBUG update_receive_plot() Started
drive_manager:266 - update_receive_plot: DEBUG Currently Configured Plot Drive: /mnt/enclosure0/front/column3/drive18
drive_manager:267 - update_receive_plot: DEBUG System Selected Plot Drive:      /mnt/enclosure0/front/column3/drive18
drive_manager:268 - update_receive_plot: DEBUG Configured and Selected Drives Match!
drive_manager:269 - update_receive_plot: DEBUG No changes necessary to /root/plot_manager/receive_plot.sh
drive_manager:270 - update_receive_plot: DEBUG Plots left available on configured plotting drive: 58

If you want to receive notifications, you need to properly configure your local MTA (install.sh install postfix by default) and test it. In addition, if you want to use Pushbullet to receive SMS text messages via Twilio you need to configure those accounts and then update system_info.py with the correct account information. Failure to do so will result in you not getting any notifications.

Once you have notifications setup and tested:

When the plot drives do change, you get a nicely formatted email:

Server: chianas01
New Plot Drive Selected at 10:17:17
Previous Plotting Drive............................../mnt/enclosure0/front/column2/drive17
# of Plots on Previous Plotting Drive................56
New Plotting Drive (by mountpoint).................../mnt/enclosure0/front/column2/drive17
New Plotting Drive (by device)......................./dev/sdq1
Drive Size...........................................10.9T
# of Plots on we can put on this Drive...............53

Environmental & Health
Drive Serial Number..................................00000000
Current Drive Temperature............................31°C
Last Smart Test Health Assessment....................PASS

Other Information
Total Plots on chianas01.............................1691
Current Total Number of Plot Drives..................24
Number of k32 Plots until full.......................925
Max # of Plots with current # of Drives..............2640
Approx. # of Days to fill all Plot Drives............16

and a text or pushbullet message: Plot Drive Updated: Was: /mnt/enclosure0/front/column3/drive17, Now: /mnt/enclosure0/front/column3/drive18

And if you choose, once a day you can get a daily update email:

NAS Server: chianas01
Daily Update Email - Generated at 22:15:46
Current Plotting Drive (by mountpoint)..................../mnt/enclosure0/front/column3/drive22
Current Plotting Drive (by device)......................../dev/sdw1
Drive Size................................................10.9T

Environmental & Health
Drive Serial Number.......................................00000000
Current Drive Temperature.................................25°C
Last Smart Test Health Assessment.........................PASS

Other Information
Total Plots on chianas01..................................2944
Current Total Number of Plot Drives.......................44
Number of k32 Plots until full............................1852
Max # of Plots with current # of Drives...................4840
Plots Being Farmed as reported by Chia....................2939
Total Plot Space in use as reported by Chia...............291 TiB

Plotting Speed
Total Plots Last 24 Hours.................................79
Average Plots Per Hour....................................3.3
Average Plotting Speed Last 24 Hours......................7.979 TiB/Day
Approx. # of Days to fill all Plot Drives.................23

Staring with V0.3 (April 4th, 2021) (and updated once again in V0.98) I have started to add in command line options to make getting plot and other information easier and to generate reports on the fly. Currently, the command line options that are available are:

• -h or --help
• -v or --version
• -ct or --check_temps
• -hr or --health_report
• -pr or --plot_report (use -pre to have the report emailed)
• -fr or --farm_report (use -fre to have the report emailed)
• -ud or --update_daily
• -rp or --replace-plot
• -uuid or --check_uuid
• -off or --offline_hdd
• -on or --online_hdd

-h --help and -v --version
These options print out the help message or version information and exits.

-dr --drive_report
This option outputs the HTML version of the Daily Drive Report email to the screen and also emails. This only works if configured. If this notification is set to off, this will do nothing.

-hr --health_report
This option runs a simple "it's alive" check against all remote harvesters configured in your main configuration file and returns a simple report:

-pr --plot_report
This option prints out a quick version of the daily plot report to the screen and exits. Utilizing the option -pre will also email the same report. This can also be set in your crontab to get a copy of this new report emailed to you each day.

-fr --farm_report
This option prints out a full farm daily plot report to the screen and exits. Utilizing the option -fre will also email the same report. This can also be set in your crontab to get a copy of this new report emailed to you each day.

-uuid --check_uuid
This option searches all configured harvesters for a specific UUID and returns the harvester and mountpoint where it was found:

OR

-ud --update_daily
This option is really designed to be called from your crontab right before you run your daily email:

01 00 * * * cd /root/plot_manager && /usr/bin/python3 /root/plot_manager/drive_manager.py -ud >/dev/null 2>&1
02 00 * * * cd /root/plot_manager && /usr/bin/python3 /root/plot_manager/drive_manager.py -dr >/dev/null 2>&1

It is designed to calculate the information necessary for the daily plot report. You can run it anytime you want but it will reset this information to the point in time you called it as opposed to giving you a 24-hour view of your system.

I wanted a simple way to keep track of when I won coins and how many I had so I added coin_monitor.py to the mix. As I said, in my configuration I have three servers, my plotter, my nas, and my farmer. Coin Monitor sits on my farm and watches for new coins. When it sees that there is a new coin, it updates the config file and writes that coin information to the logfile (new_coins.log), and depending on what notifications you have set up you can receive a notification via SMS, Email, and PushBullet. If you have per_coin_email set to True/1 in coin_monitoring_config you will also receive a nicely formatted email on top of your other notifications.

This is stand-alone and can be combined with or without my plot_manager scripts.

Installation is pretty straightforward. Copy it into your preferred directory and then edit coin_monitor.py and make sure that you set plotnft to True or False and if True, set plotnft_wallet to the correct wallet id:

plotnft = True
plotnft_wallet = 2

I try to autodetect how you installed Chia (via APT on Ubuntu or Git), if it fails or you installed a different way or on a different platform, you may have to hardcode the path to your Chia binaries.

I have had a couple of people ask about the hardware that I used in my setup so I thought I would include it here. Almost everything I purchased was used on eBay. There were minor exceptions but 95% was eBay.

Dell R820
4 x E5-4657L V2 CPUs (48 Cores, 96 Threads)
512GB DDR3 1600Mhz RAM
Dell 4 x NVMe Drive Cage and Controller
4 x 4TB Intel P4510 NVMe Drives (temp drives)
LSI 9431-8i 12Gbs SAS Controller
8 x HGST 1.6TB SAS3 12Gbs SSDs (5.8 PBW) (HUSMR1616ASS205)
(2 in RAID1 for OS, 6 x RAID0 as -d drive)
2 x 10Gbe & 2x 1Gbe NICs
iDrac Enterprise
Dual Power Supplies

Supermicro 4U 36 Bay SAS3 Chassis w/X10DRi-T4+ Motherboard
2 x E5-2690 v4 CPU
256GB ECC
1 x AOC-S3008L-8LE 12GB/s SAS3 Controller (IT Mode)
2 x LSI9300-16e 12GB/s External (IT Mode)
36 x 12TB Seagate Exos Drives
10Gbe NICs (on motherboard)
Dual Power Supplies

10 x SuperMicro 847 45-Drive Chassis
Dual Power supplies

Ubuntu 22.04.3 LTS VM running on Proxmox

My extra drive chassis are empty right now, but as you can see from my drive layout and mounting the strategy above, it is super easy to add more drives.

V0.991b 2023-09-04

• Relocated & reconfigured Farmer & Harvester Health checks so they could be installed/used standalone.

V0.991a 2023-08-28

• Updated farmer_health_check.py to include notifications, better checks, and better logging.
• Updated install script for additional packages
• Added new drive listing function in drive_manager.py (./drive_manager.py -dl)

V0.991 2023-08-22

• Created farmer_health_check.py to monitor the status of the farmer and force a reboot if it fails.
• Updated coin_monitor.py to support Chia version 1.8.2

V0.99 2023-07-22

• Updated to support new logging format for reports (current through 1.8.2)

V0.98 2021-10-15

• Rewrote reporting utilizing Python Rich (https://github.com/willmcgugan/rich)
• Begin Python typing addition to functions (work in progress)
• Minor bug fixes
• Minor enhancements
• Added new Email reports (Host and Farm) (Trigger from CLI or Cron)
• Added function to email HTML based reports generated by RICH (-pre and -fre from the CLI)

V0.97 2021-09-16

• Rewrote harvester export routines and functions to better see if a harvester has a transfer in progress.
• Redesigned check_network_io.sh script to better prevent failures of script.
• Implemented @lru_cache to speed up execution when calling the same function more than once.
• Minor bug fixes and enhancements

V0.96 2021-09-05

• Rewrote nas_export functions to better function with replace old plot functions when determining what to report to the plotters.
• Adding ability for plotter to prioritize between fill empty space and replace old plots since each harvester could be configured differently.

V0.95 2021-09-03

• Replaces glances with sysstat commands to check and verify network traffic
• Update install script to create new network check script based on install directory
• Created failsafe to allow free drive space to be filled when 'replace_plots' has been set to yes and there are no more old plots to replace. Now falls back to filling empty drive space after that happens and will notify you when both fail.
• Various bug fixes and enhancements.

V0.94 2021-08-08

• Automatic plot removal and replacement of older style plots with new style pooling plots done on a one-by-one basis to keep as many plots farming as possible during the plot replacement process.
• Various bug fixes and other small enhancements
• Updated Farming Wide reports to report on number of portable plots vs old plots and if we are replacing old plots or not on a per-server basis.
• Updated nas_export to include the number of old plots and if server is set to replace old plots, the total number of plot space available on server is now the total of the number of old plots to replace along with how many plots we can store on remaining free space.

V0.93 2021-07-08

• Added ability to identify plots as portable (set pooling: True in config file) and all new plots will be prepended with portable.. Eventually I will add in the ability to overwrite old plots with new plots during new pooling plot creation. This ASSUMES 1.2.0 and has nothing to do with the plotting itself, just (as always) with the management of the plots.

V0.9 2021-05-28

• Added full multi-harvester capabilities to plot_manager.py along with host checks for all harvesters prior to attempting a plot move.
• Reworked all scripts to auto detect installation path and remove the necessity to make a bunch of path changes in the scripts.
• Various bug fixes and other small enhancements.

V0.8 2021-05-24

• Added Multi-Harvester Reporting. Once configured across all harvesters you can run a farm report from any of your harvesters. Outputs all of your harvester data to a json file which is then grabbed when you run the report. Utilizes Paramiko to manage the sftp connection between the harvesters. If you want to utilize this, please be sure to read the instructions below.

• Added additional command line utility to drive_manager.py:

  • -fr or --farm_report Quick total Farm Report outputs to screen

V0.7 2021-05-17

• Minor bug fixes and spelling error corrections.
• Additional of auto_drive.py script.

V0.6 2021-04-22

• Minor updates to move_local_plots.py to utilize Disk I/O to verify that we have not stalled a plot move. Attempts to auto correct and restart the copy/move process if we detect a failure.
• Added plot checking via Chia logs to match against how many plots are currently reported as being on the system. Also included total drive space in use by Chia.
• Updated the plot report as well as the Daily Report with above plot information. It is not uncommon for there to be a little difference in the numbers as a result of moves/copies in progress, etc. But if the number is more than say 5 or 6 plots, you might want to check your logs for other issues.

V0.5 2021-04-22

• Added ability to manage locally plotted plots in addition to remote plots. This allow you to plot on your NAS/Harvester and have those plots managed much like the plots from a remote system. This is set up as a separate script called move_local_plots.py. Please see the notes in that script for more information.

V0.4 2021-04-13

• Added ability to "offline" a particular drive for maintenance. When you offline a drive it prevents drive_manager.py from using that drive to store plots until you "online" it again.
• Only drives that are currently mounted and available on the system and listed as plot drives can be offlined.
• Only drives that have been offlined can be onlined. If you run ./drive_manager.py -h you will get a list of drives that have been offlined. If no drives have been offlined you will not see the -on or --online_hdd options.
• Modified the sorting option for all plots drives using natsort. This sorts now completely on drive number naturally.
• -off or --offline_hdd Offlines a particular drive for maintenance, Error to stdout if drive is not mounted or not aplot drive.
• -on or --online_hdd Online a drive that has been offlined making it immediately available for plots. Only drives that have been offline will be listed.
  
  

V0.3 2021-04-04 Added multiple command line utilities to drive_manager.py including:

• -dr or --drive_report Immediately runs the Daily Report and sends email (if configured).
• -ct or --check_temps Checks the temperatures of all drives and returns a report to stdout.
• -pr or --plot_report Quick plot report like email report but to stdout.
• -ud or --update_daily Designed to be called from cron one per 24-hours. Updates the daily plot stats to provide 24 hours plotting stats (total plots, hourly plots, days until full).

Added plot time informtion to the dailey email report including:

• Total plots last 24 hours
• Average plots per hour (last 24 hours)
• Average plotting speed (last 24 hours)
  
  

V0.2 2021-03-23

• Moved system logging types to plot_manager_config and updated necessary functions.
• Added per_plot system notification function (send_new_plot_notification()).
• Updated read_config_data() to support ConfigParser boolean returns.
• Updated necessary functions for read_config_data() change