Harvesters works as connecting the plots into Farmer via SSL remotely. Single harvesters can contains many plots. And yes, many harvesters can connect to single Farmer, which easier for you decouple from storage depedencies.
If you confuse what is Farmer? This is what farmer looks like
This is the main software that you are running to farming your plots. Farmer must only works in single machine as your only gateway to Chia Network.
Next, what is Harvester? It’s services that running separately than Main software. Ideally, you run this service into separate machine where you store your plots.
So, imagine I have main machine that maximum 20TB capacities and running the Farmer. Also, I have another machine with 120TB plots storage and connected via LAN to the main machine.
Usually, you can share folder so main machine can access the storage. With harvester, you can avoid the hassle in giving permission and make it more secure. This are the step to do it
1. Copy SSL Certificate from Main to Harvester machine
- Go to your main machine and edit your config.yaml
- Edit the log_level from WARNING into INFO
Then open your powershell and copy ca folder located in your “.chia” folder. In this case, i’m using Windows 10 and need to go user folder as root.
I have harvester machine which is Ubuntu with IP 192.168.10.8. So what I’ll doing is copy the folder using scp
scp -r .chia\mainnet\config\ssl\ca dev@192.168.10.8:/home/dev/2. Configure your harvester machine
Go to path where you see the ca folder, then do the initialization
chia init -c caThen edit your configuration at ~/.chia/mainnet/config/config.yaml. Change WARNING into INFO. Then, configure the harvesters to start sending data to farmer_peer IP-ADDRESS and the paths that have plots inside.
In this example, my main farmer IP is 192.168.10.9 and have several folders contain plots.
3. Start the harvester machine
chia start harvesterIf you want to check your plots, can do command “chia plots check”.
Then restart your farmer services. Now two machine connected without need to share any private keys To check, you can read on ~/.chia/mainnet/log/debug.log on both machine.
On harvester machine
On main machine i ran command cat .chia\mainnet\log\debug.log | grep “192.168”
Or check via GUI in your Chia main farmer
Congrats! Now you can scale your harvesters machine and putting somewhere else without worries the main machine being exposed!
If your harvesters is not working or not connected to main, you can check on harverster log, if the IP is correct or disconnected multiple times.
Try to restart the main and harvester services (in Windows, harvesters can double running, be careful).
If you are using Windows, make sure the port 8447 is open for inbound and outbound in main and harvester