One Way To Fix An Unresponsive OpenGPU Provider 🏗️

This post is for OpenGPU providers who have successfully set up their systems to generate passive income using the OpenGPU Provider Suite. See this post for some tips about that.

Help, My Earnings Have Stopped!

Sometimes “passive income” requires “aggressive action”. This is the case when you find that your provider is no longer earning rewards. There are many reasons this could happen and there are multiple ways you can attempt to rectify the situation.

Usually, the go-to suggestion is uninstall/reinstall the Provider Suite, unregister/reregister the sources for which you are attempting to provide your cycles, or both things. While this will work in most of the cases, there are some drawbacks:

• Uninstalling and reinstalling the Provider Suite can take a bit of time. If you have multiple providers experiencing problems, this time adds up quickly.
• Unregistering and reregistering the sources will cost you transaction fees. On the OpenGPU network, transaction fees are laughably infinitesimal compared to Ethereum, but they are still a cost you might be able to avoid.

Another method I’ve used that works for me involves directly managing the containers that are running inside the OpenGPU image. I’m providing on the Windows platform, so that means the OpenGPU image is their WSL distribution. This article will therefore be specific to how you would use this method on Windows platforms. It should be similar on the other supported platforms (basically you will want to get a shell into the OpenGPU image).

The first thing you will want to do is determine if any of this is necessary at all. Sometimes you won’t earn rewards because you aren’t the first provider to provide the solution or it just isn’t your time to be rewarded by the OpenGPU Activity Rewarder source. But, how do you tell? I am glad you asked!

Head to the management dashboard and locate the “My Latest Tasks” section. Look for the most recent task that has a status of “Finalized” and expand its details by clicking the “Show” dropdown in the “Information” column. This will show all the providers who have registered for that task’s source and their various response details.

Find your provider address in that list and check what the “Status” was. If you see “Submitted”, then everything is working normally and there isn’t much you can do but keep providing. If, however, the status is “Awaiting Response” you may need to do a little more work. I like to go to the Tasks page and filter by “Status = Finalized”. Once there I spot check a few more of the entries to see if all my recent responses are showing “Awaiting Response”. If so, then I have a pretty good idea that my containers aren’t working well.

There is a little bit of nuance here. My system isn’t fast enough to respond to the text2text or text2image tasks before they get finalized, so that’s why I like to use the activity rewarder responses for my investigations.

Okay, so now you’ve determined that your provider isn’t responding at all, what’s next? You want to run some commands in the OpenGPU image. On Windows, the easiest way to do this is to open a PowerShell terminal and run: wsl -d OpenGPU. This should eventually drop you into a shell where you are the root user of the OpenGPU image. Danger! The root user is all powerful, proceed with caution.

Now you can check the status of the Docker containers that are running (or not!) in the image. Run the command docker ps -a or docker container ls. There should be one container for each source you have registered plus one or two more. You want to pay attention to the “STATUS” column of the output. If any of the images show anything other than “Up [some time value]” then that is why your provider is not responding.

Once you’ve identified the problem child(ren), you can try to stop/restart them. The output from the last command has a “CONTAINER ID” column. Using that ID, run the following commands:

root@host:/# docker container stop [ID] 
root@host:/# docker container start [ID] 

Wait a few seconds then run docker ps -a or docker container ls again. Make sure the container status is “Up [some time value]”. Wait a few more seconds and check it again. If the container hasn’t exited (i.e., status is still “Up”), congratulations! You have successfully restarted the container(s).

Now you can go back to the management dashboard and check the next few finalized transactions and see if your provider is having its response status listed as “Submitted”.

Wrapping Up

In this article I presented a way to try and fix an unresponsive provider without uninstalling/reinstalling the provider suite or unregistering/reregistering the sources for which you are interested in providing your idle resources by directly managing the Docker containers that are actually providing the task response. I hope this is helpful for some of you and happy earning!