I have cloned litecoin to make my own altcoin for fun and i want to solo mine the new coin using cpuminer on mainnet. I have compiled and installed cpu miner in my Mac OSX and i am running the altcoin daemon and opened the port as well.

./src/altcoind -daemon

When i run cpuminer i get this error.

./minerd -o http://127.0.0.1:26201 -O litecoinrpc:9eac7ba52764a6d42aa48386e8f435f8 -a scrypt --no-longpoll --no-getwork --no-stratum --coinbase-addr=xxxxxx

[2018-02-27 17:55:48] Binding thread 2 to cpu 2
[2018-02-27 17:55:48] Binding thread 0 to cpu 0
[2018-02-27 17:55:48] Binding thread 1 to cpu 1
[2018-02-27 17:55:48] Binding thread 4 to cpu 4
[2018-02-27 17:55:48] Binding thread 3 to cpu 3
[2018-02-27 17:55:48] Binding thread 5 to cpu 5
[2018-02-27 17:55:48] 8 miner threads started, using 'scrypt' algorithm.
[2018-02-27 17:55:48] Binding thread 6 to cpu 6
[2018-02-27 17:55:48] Binding thread 7 to cpu 7
[2018-02-27 17:55:48] HTTP request failed: Failed to connect to 127.0.0.1 port 26201: Connection refused
[2018-02-27 17:55:48] json_rpc_call failed, retry after 30 seconds

Here is my altcoin.conf

rpcuser=litecoinrpc
rpcpassword=xxxxxx
rpcport=262012
rpcallowip=127.0.0.1
server=1
gen=1
listen=1

Why is cpuminer not working?

Another attempt: I changed the conf file removing port

rpcuser=litecoinrpc
rpcpassword=xxxx
rpcallowip=127.0.0.1
listen=1
server=1
daemon=1

and now it seems to connect to the port but i receive, empty reply from server

[2018-02-27 18:23:11] Binding thread 4 to cpu 4
[2018-02-27 18:23:11] Binding thread 5 to cpu 5
[2018-02-27 18:23:11] Binding thread 6 to cpu 6
[2018-02-27 18:23:11] 8 miner threads started, using 'scrypt' algorithm.
[2018-02-27 18:23:11] Binding thread 7 to cpu 7
[2018-02-27 18:23:11] HTTP request failed: Empty reply from server
[2018-02-27 18:23:11] json_rpc_call failed, retry after 30 seconds

Any help or advise is much appreciated.