Control a Train at Home miner remotely, with your consent

When a Mac running Train at Home hangs while you are away, the usual fix is to restart the official app. subnera hub lets you do that from a browser on your phone, but only on Macs where you have said yes. This guide covers what you can send, how a command reaches the Mac, where it is recorded, and what the design rules out. subnera is unofficial and not affiliated with IOTA, Macrocosmos or Bittensor.

Before anything else: the consent switch

Remote control is an extra step on top of connecting a Mac to the hub. A Mac that reports to subnera hub can be watched, but it cannot be controlled until you allow it on that Mac itself:

1. Open subnera's menu, then Remote Dashboard Settings….
2. Tick Allow remote control (start / stop / restart / watchdog).

The box is off by default. It is greyed out while the Mac is not enrolled, and it is reset to off every time you enroll again, disconnect, or the hub revokes the Mac. The Mac reads it live for each command, so unticking it takes effect immediately. Nobody can tick it from the hub.

The fixed list of commands

The hub can only send nine command types. The agent in subnera maps each one to a fixed action in its code. Anything else is rejected as unsupported.

Commands that need Allow remote control:

• Start: launches the official app in the background.
• Stop: quits the official app.
• Restart: quits and relaunches it.
• Reap orphans (button label "Reap orphans"): kills the worker process the official app can leave behind when it quits. It is refused while the app is running, because that worker is then your live miner.
• Watchdog on / off: turns the local auto-restart watchdog on or off.

Commands that do not need it:

• Log stream and log fetch: show recent CLI log lines in your browser, either streamed for up to 60 minutes or as the last 256 KB at most. Enrolling a Mac already means its log can be viewed from the hub.
• Measure now: runs one Apple networkQuality test. It has its own opt-in on the Mac ("Measure real bandwidth"), is refused in busy phases and is limited to one run every 10 minutes.

A stop or restart while the Mac is queued is refused by default, because it would lose your queue position. The hub asks you to confirm a forced stop or restart. After any stop or restart, the local watchdog stays quiet for 5 minutes so it does not relaunch an app you stopped on purpose.

How a command travels

1. You press a button on the machine page. subnera hub checks that you have the right permission in the pool (see pools and roles) and queues the command.
2. The Mac polls the hub about every 10 seconds. It picks the command up on its next report cycle, so expect a delay of a few seconds, not an instant effect.
3. The agent checks the command against its allowlist, your consent switch and the current state of the miner, then runs it or rejects it with a reason.
4. The result goes back to the hub with the next report.

A command expires after 10 minutes. If the Mac was offline, it is not executed later. The Mac's clock must also be correct: a clock more than 10 minutes ahead of the hub rejects every command as expired.

Where commands are recorded

• On the Mac: every command and its verdict (EXECUTED, FAILED or REJECTED with the reason) is appended to ~/Library/Logs/subnera/remote-audit.log. The file rotates at about 1 MB.
• In the hub: the machine page has a Recent commands list with the type, status, who sent it, when, and the result message.

Rejected commands are logged too, so a refused attempt leaves a trace.

What is never possible

• No shell: the hub sends a command name, never a string that gets executed.
• No remote code and no remote app update: the hub cannot replace or patch subnera.
• No root: the agent runs as your user, in user space, with no daemon.
• No wallet files: the only wallet file read is the public hotkey. The agent signs nothing.
• No change to the official app, its preferences or its bundle.
• No connection to the official app's local websocket, the same boundary described in the network guide.

So, is it safe?

The risk is bounded by design: a small list of actions, an off-by-default switch you control on each Mac, and a record on both sides. It still lets someone with access to your hub account stop your miner, so protect that account and give pool members only the role they need. If you do not want remote control on a Mac, leave the box unticked. Monitoring, alerts and the log viewer keep working. For the dashboard itself, see the fleet hub guide. This guide makes no promise about earnings.