Worker
A worker is the name of one specific miner in a pool. It is how you tell your ASICs apart in the stats and spot which one dropped off.
What a worker is
You have one pool account, but there may be twenty asics behind it. So the stats do not blur into one pile, each miner introduces itself by its own name: that is the worker. It usually goes after your login with a dot, something like login.rack1-01.
The pool keeps a separate chart for every worker: hashrate, accepted and rejected shares, time of last activity. When something drops off at night, in the morning you see a specific name sitting at zero instead of a vague dip in total terahash.
Pick names that lead you to the physical asic. Rack number and position beat a serial number: rack2-05 walks you straight to the shelf, s21-8873 sends you down the rows with a flashlight.
The short version
| What it is | a miner's name inside a pool account |
| Where it is set | in the pool settings on the asic itself |
| Format | usually login.name, Latin letters, digits, hyphen |
| Worker password | most pools do not check it |
| What it is for | telling asics apart and catching dropped ones |
How to keep your workers in order
Pick a naming scheme once and stick to it: location plus number, say garaje-03 or rack1-12. When the fleet grows, you will thank yourself.
Pools have alerts: a worker stays silent longer than a set time, you get an email or a message. Turn them on right away, with a threshold of fifteen minutes or so. One asic idle overnight is a lost day of mining, and people usually notice it around lunchtime.
If the pool shows a worker offline while the ASIC is humming and warm, start with the network: ping the pool server, check the cable, check the switch port. Through a dropped connection the miner itself keeps spinning its fans as if nothing happened.
Example
You have three asics: an S21 in the garage and two L7s in the storage room. The workers are garaje-01, trastero-01 and trastero-02. In the morning the stats show zero for trastero-02: you walk straight to it instead of checking all three. The check takes a minute instead of half an hour.
Related terms
Where to go next on the site
Hardware
- Antminer S21 tool
- ASIC Miner knowledge base
Software
- Software firmware
- HashCore Toolkit firmware
Questions and answers
Why a worker has a password if nobody checks it
A leftover from the protocol. Most pools accept any value, people usually put x or 123. There are exceptions where the field carries settings, the docs of the specific pool describe those.
Can all asics share one name
Technically often yes, but the stats will merge into one line and you will hunt the dropped asic on foot. Different names are free diagnostics.
Worker offline, asic running. Whose fault is it
Almost always the network between the miner and the pool: router, cable, port, provider. Less often a wrong pool address after a firmware or settings change.
How the terms connect
Every link in the chain is clickable. Orange marks where you are now.
Looking for an ASIC miner
The catalog holds 212 models. You can compare them by hashrate and by joules per terahash, then plug your own rate into the calculator and see what stays in your pocket.
Page written and checked by Denys Klimchuk. Updated .