[Ethereum] Can’t get ether from Rinkeby testnet faucet

There are two/three ways to get ether on your own private testnet:

1. Using Faucet as you did (i would not do this that way).
2. Mining: as mining in your own testnet (probably with lower mining difficulty) is far much easier, you can get tons of ether quickly.
3. Generating a custom Genesis file for your testnet and pre-allocating some ether.

Check this: https://github.com/ethereum/go-ethereum/wiki/Command-Line-Options

And this: https://souptacular.gitbooks.io/ethereum-tutorials-and-tips-by-hudson/content/private-chain.html

This question has gotten a lot of views and still no answer so I thought I might as well post what I know. I haven't done much related to Ethereum lately so it might be a little outdated.

Basically, the guide gives as an example miner.start(8) which is pretty small. You're here to get your ether as soon as possible so you don't need to think small. In the doc I wrote, I said:

To start mining:

miner.start(64)

When you successfully mine a block, you get 5 ether. This operation can take around 20 minutes. To see if your account has ether:

primary = eth.accounts[0]

eth.getBalance(primary)

It should show something other than 0.

So basically if you have the CPU and really need ether, you can start as many threads as you need, 128, 256. I didn't experiment enough to know performance of each but it worked for me so I moved on. Feel free to add your experience if it's relevant.