Namecoin Forum

Alpha pool is back and functional. I started a new topic for the alpha pool: http://dot-bit.org/forum/viewtopic.php? ... 1490#p1490 I'll try to keep the thread up to date and announce longer downtimes there.

Happy mining!

I just deployed the current version. With this version the pool is ready to handle any auxiliary chain for merged mining. Thus there are some changes:

• You can now add and verify a BTC address in the dashboard
• The worker table now shows estimated earning, shares and stales per blockchain (NMC and BTC at the moment)
• Top 10 contributors now shows shares and Mhash averaged over the last 15 minutes. Due to the fact that we now support more than one blockchain it wont make any sense to show all shares within a current round.
• Statistics now show unconfirmed blocks. But they are empty at the moment. Like with namecoins we will start bitcoins with confirmations enabled until the pool has enough funds to pay directly after a block is found.
• I cleaned up the dashboard an added all configuration stuff to sub menus.

I hope you like the improved user interface. If you have any suggestions or ideas, please let me know here, via twitter or use the feedback button on the website.

Happy mining!

So when will we start to see the BTC and NMC mine at the same time?

At the moment we agreed on block 24k. But as this is in several month from now we are discussing to start earlier. It depends a bit on the maturity of the namecoind. At the moment we are testing release candidate 3 and it looks quite promising. If you want to join the discussion have a look at this thread:

http://dot-bit.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=217

We just faced a massive amount of incoming connections from bogus IPs. At a first glance it seems like a HTTP DDoS on the pool RPC Port. Massive RPC requests but not from miners. But I'll investigate on this issue. I added the connection pattern to the blacklist. Pool is coming back to normal operations. I'm sorry for the inconvenience.

The downtime (from miners view) was about 15 minutes.

I'm just preparing a rollout. There are two major changes with this rollout:

Instant Payouts:
will have a minimum payout amount of 0.5 NMC (currently 0.01). Maximum Payouts per day are rescinded. You can do Instant Payouts as often as you like. Instant payouts still have two percent payout fee.

Scheduled Payouts:
are a new feature. Scheduled Payouts are batched jobs done each night at 22 pm UTC. If you enable SP in your dashboard they will be done automatically each day if you have at least 0.00001 NMC in you account. The payout fee for SP is only one percent.

rollout completed

We had an outage of about 25 minutes. An operator at the NOC misconfigured an internal switch which interconnects the pool servers with the masters. As the master servers were splitted from each other and couldn't reach any of their pool servers both initiated an namecoind emergency shutdown and their wallets were erased from the HDD for security reasons. Wallets are now restored and pool is operational again. I'll ask the NOC operators if it is possible to get redundant path with at least two switches in order to avoid such problems in future.

I'm very sorry for the inconvenience.

For the upcoming merged mining I'm evaluating scenarios for lowering the latency. For namecoin we don't have a high latency, because the network is small. But as soon as we also offer BTC a low latency will be a significant advantage over other pools. Thus for testing I have set up another mining ingress server for the pool. It is located within the EU as well. If things are going well I'd like to offer a further US mining ingress server. If you are interested in testing the new ingress server please point your miners to:
please use the same credentials as with balancer.masterpool.eu.

I want to thank all testers. The test was quite good. And it will help us survive a potential surge as soon as we start merged mining if some BTC users switch. It seems we can lower the latency significantly by having a fast interconnection between continents. For now masterpool offers the following mining ingress servers (MIS):

http://EU01.masterpool.eu:8888/ (EU, Germany)
http://US01.masterpool.eu:8888/ (US, Virginia)

From Virginia we have a quite stable 89 ms latency to our master servers and I monitor it not to go above 100 ms. This ingress servers only loops your connections through to one of the master servers. We take advantage of the fast interconnection between well connected data centers. balancer.masterpool.eu now points to EU01 but will be obsolete in future. Thus if you are able please switch to one of those MIS.

Some users were anxiuous about my announcement of a US server. They had privacy concerns. Thus I'd want to make sure that all your data except some log files is located on two master servers located in germany. Furthermore the interconnection between MIS and the master servers is encrypted by using a VPN. Thus if you are located in the US and are a bit paranoid about your government I guess it's better to use the US server as it is more likely they monitor outbound connection (which is encrypted if you use the US MIS) than national connections.

If you have suggestions about how to make the system more secure and provide better privacy I'm really interested in feedback. But please keep in mind that I have to be able to pay for such a solution and that our first goal is to lower the latency. Thus if you want to send encrypted solved blocks via USB stick I probably don't like your idea

Furthermore if you have suggestions for more MIS locations please let me know. I guess it would make sense to have an Aussie server and and Asian server. But at the moment I don't even know if we have some users there. So if you are from down under or Asia please let me know.