Bitcoin Forum

We've been working hard to bring you a much more friendly web site, more features, and a overall better Bitcoin Pool.

After several sleepless nights, we got the entire infrastructure of BitcoinPool.com upgraded.  Users can now have separate passwords for their miners and accounts.  You can set up different types of notification for when your miner dies or gets below a specified speed.  The overall service is running amazing fast now compared to what it was before.  We broken each part of the pool processes into it's own server, and connected EVERYTHING with 1Gbps Ethernet.  We got a NEW 50/50Mbps FIBER LINE activated, so there is a plenty of bandwidth available.  All the infrastructure now has battery backups for all the servers, monitor, and the network switch.  Everything could run for about 30-40 minutes if the power goes out.  The Fiber Optic connection has about a 4 hour backup battery too.  So *if* we we're to have a short power outage, we should be alright.

Here's a break down of what we are now using for the pool.  Some things have changes from what we originally planned, but it's all good.
=========================================================================
++ SERVER: MySQL ++
Dell 1950 1U Server
2 x Intel® Xeon® Processor E5405 (12M Cache, 2.00 GHz, 1333 MHz FSB) Quad-core processors
8 x 2GB DDR2 (16GB)
2 x 1Gbps NICs
2 x 250GB 7.2K RPM drives in a RAID 0 configuration
2 x 670 PSU for power redundancy

++ SERVER: Pool daemon (for miners) ++
Dell 1950 1U Server
2 x Intel® Xeon® Processor E5405 (12M Cache, 2.00 GHz, 1333 MHz FSB) Quad-core processors
8 x 1GB DDR2 (8GB)
2 x 1Gbps NICs
2 x 250GB 7.2K RPM drives in a RAID 0 configuration
2 x 670 PSU for power redundancy

++ SERVER: Website / Forum ++
Dell  1750 1U Server
2 x Intel® Xeon® Processor
8 x 1GB DDR2 (8GB)
2 x 1Gbps NICs
2 x 250GB 7.2K RPM drives in a RAID 0 configuration
2 x 670 PSU for power redundancy

++ SERVER: NAS Backup ++
2TB Seagate w/ 1Gbps NIC

++ NETWORK: Switch ++
HP ProCurve 48 Port Gigabit Switch

++ POWER: Battery Backups ++
2 x CyberPower AVR UPS Battery Backup. Each supports up to 900Watts.
1 x APC 1300 XS
 
++ POWER: Management ++
1 x APC Rack PDU Metered 1U, 120V, 20A
=========================================================================

PICS

The old server.  Yeah, not that impressive.
http://www.bitcoinpool.com/upgrade/DSCN2552.JPG

The NEW SERVERS!
http://www.bitcoinpool.com/upgrade/DSCN2550.JPG

http://www.bitcoinpool.com/upgrade/DSCN2551.JPG

http://www.bitcoinpool.com/upgrade/DSCN2548.JPG

A view from the back side of the 42U
http://www.bitcoinpool.com/upgrade/DSCN2554.JPG

Both of the 42U Racks.  My roommates is on the left, mine is on the right.
http://www.bitcoinpool.com/upgrade/DSCN2562.JPG

It was already installed, we just needed to get it activate.  Yes, this is FIBER OPTIC run to the home, on a business account.  The servers are about 30ft of Cat5e away from this box.
http://www.bitcoinpool.com/upgrade/DSCN2561.JPG

And of course we need a speedtest.  I couldn't find any servers that would max out the line, but this is the best I could find. :)
http://www.bitcoinpool.com/upgrade/Speedtest.png

Geebus working...
http://www.bitcoinpool.com/upgrade/DSCN2567.JPG

Myself working...
http://www.bitcoinpool.com/upgrade/DSCN2566.JPG

So that just about sums it up.  The servers are doing very well so far.  We hope you appreciate all the effort and lack of sleep we've put into getting things up to speed.  We're still doing some code updates here and there, and plan on releasing a few more tools on the site as well in the up coming days.  We'd also like to say a special THANK YOU to coderman for his help with tuning the DB to being able to handle several million records at any given moment.  

Stop on by and check it out. (https://www.bitcoinpool.com/)


HAPPY MINING!   ;D

- Bitcoin Pool Staff

It took you this long to separate miner passwords -- sent unencrypted over the Internet -- from user passwords?

Wow.  Just, wow.

How are you cooling all of that?

Actually, we've had it for awhile now, but we don't feel obligated to post every little change on this forum when we use our own. :)

WTF you're running it out of your house?  What are you planning on doing when the grid goes down?  What is your SLA on teh business fiber?

*EDIT* but v nice hardware :)  You and your roommate both have a nice rack

About 4 years ago we had a substation blowup. 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZNHdW3ZOEWA&feature=related

After the substation blew, PGE redesigned the entire cities power to be able to quickly transfer power to areas that were affected by power outages.  So long as it's not this bad, we're usually back up within 15-30 minutes.

So get this, I was running this server off of my 20/20Mbps residential fiber connection for 3 months, and my ISP didn't say a word.  I guess if it's not torrents, they don't care much. ;)  I did ask them if I could run 1 or more servers from the business line.  They said I can run anything I need to for "my business", meaning web and pool servers are approved.


ROTF LMAO   :D
Thank you?!  LMAO

Three servers are not producing that much heat...yet, but it's only 75 outside today.  We have two eight inch Vortex fans (industrial, not vortex PC fans) exhausting most the heat from the garage, and a box fan mounted to the front of the 42U rack just to give it some extra air flow.  Being 75 outside, the metal on the servers is still cool to the touch, so I don't think we're going to have much a problem.  Just incase it is a problem down the road, I got two idle AC units ready to go.

Thanks bitcoinpool.com for the server upgrade and the free 6870 from the contest!

Will upload pics of rig soon, the second card has doubled my hash rate to over 500Mh/s :) :) :)

Awesome, you gained my miners!

gahphue9, thank you for mining with us. 

If you too want to possibly win our monthly giveaway contest, then you should start mining with us sooner than later.

Card from contest furthest from CPU. Added to XFX 6870 just in time for difficulty increases :P

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3460/5819639594_4261fb83f2_z.jpg
http://www.flickr.com/photos/63911298@N02/5819639594/ (http://www.flickr.com/photos/63911298@N02/5819639594/)

Cool are you guys part of Anonymous !!! If so great work!

Being that Bitcoin is a currency that protects your identity, I thought it would be an appropriate mask to use. :)

those servers look expensive. How did you pay for them?

We got them on an economic downturn discount from a very lovely company that used to produce facebook games.

I don't like that you have the mask on, creepy, im out.

REALLY? Im sending my 5Gh/sec because of the mask :P

Awesome.  Thanks.

Down? :(

Strong recommendation to avoid this pool.  The operators are rude, childish and extremely unprofessional.  Search their previous posts and see for yourself, many examples of swearing and unprofessional conduct.  Avoid!

It's a home operation, not a "real pool" in a data center.

However it's good variety when the bigger ones are down.

>implying they're paid to do this

After researching all the available options, I decided to go with your pool.  Proud to support your homegrown operation.  Rest assured that your sleepless nights are helping out cool people.

Just a tech question guys, how much bandwidth do you actually use for pool operation right now (at ~250 GH/s and ~600 users-miners)?

To make things clear, I want to run a pool for Bitcoiners in my country (which seem to be very few at the moment) to promote BTC use, something that we will need very soon around here. I got some servers sitting idle at the moment, and I wonder what kind of line I should get.

I would appreciate any reply.

Keep up the good work.

didn't Google first host their servers in a garage?

Feature request: e-mail notification when miner efficiency drops below a certain value.  The reason for this is because I've twice had what is either phoenix or my card crap out on me, where the miner would continue to receive shares from BitcoinPool, but not solve them.  When this happens, my efficiency dropped pretty quickly, and I had to reboot my machine to get things back on track.  The faster I could get notified to do this, the better it would be for myself, as well as the pool.

You can set an email to be sent out based on the MH/s the pool sees. If you get your efficiency problem, your card may have a high hash rate but the pool will see a low one due to the low number of solved shares.

Already doing it. :)

I have it set up to, but didn't get any e-mails when the pool went down and my miner was idle during the DoS attacks in the past 12 hours. Shouldn't I still have gotten an e-mail?

Edit: Now I just got my first idle notification timestamped at a minute past noon, after I'd already restarted my connection at 12:03 pm. Craziness.

Our e-mail service provider thought we were spamming when we sent out several thousand e-mail addresses notifying users that their miners were idle.  This has resulted in every e-mail being filtered.  We're talking with our hosting provider right now to get them to unban our server and allow the e-mails to continue. 

Question:

Whats wrong with your stats? Do you fake stats or do you just have a JSON/site issue?

Website: Current Round:  06h 33m 03s

JSON: {"round_duration":"00:00:32:08","round_shares":"76959"

 ??? ??? ???

Cheers

Yep, something's definitely up.  The JSON stats have reset 3 or 4 times in the last hour.

The JSON is no where near correct.  What is going on?

Quite nice for pool jumping though.  Looks to be even better now with more Gh/s coming in.

So the JSON stats are still way out and resetting all the time.  Is this intentional?

At these regular intervals on the long block it looks like nothing other than intentional.

So where is my payment for 140701,  140745 and  140752?  All confirmed and yet I am not able to pay them out to myself and they still are in the "unconfirmed" total.

Am I missing something?  Do we have to wait a certain time period after a block being confirmed?  Whats going on? All I see is orange -:----------- which the website says:

I could be wrong in this, but the pool operators thought that if everyone completed their getworks then they would find blocks faster.  And I am not sure "proved" is the right word as no one doubted it.  Are any other pools banning people for low efficiency?  Do any other pools even show it as a statistic?

---finally received the payout---

yeah payouts are a bit random.

the json stats are nutty.. i'm not sure why.
if there is a reason behind it, they should disclose it, otherwise it looks like bad programming and the fact that it still exists makes me wonder about the rest of the pools coding.


please let us know what is up.

Everyone should read the 2nd recent post: (was it on purpose that you posted the way less important news of changing miner passwords again to make it to the top?)

http://www.bitcoinpool.com/index.php

So let me get this straight:

the current reward system is still hoppable to about 23% of the round because your efficiency is still above 1
but unlike slush's method where the money you lose because the round is long goes to other people, it goes to the bitcoinpool management

in fact slush's hop-off point is about 15% so the slush score system is better against hoppers, this system just punishes normal users who lose their connection and FURTHERMORE punishes all users because their shares are being stolen by hoppers still, but now some of that is going to the pool operators instead of just the hoppers

Not true. First major flaw with your logic is NOBODY knows how long the round is going to take, hence you don't know when 23% of the round is.  Secondly, we totally mess with the stats to trick pool hopping software.  The only people this affects is pool-hoppers, which we are more than happy to discourage from even trying to use our pool.

As stated on the front news page.


So 25% of the a pool hoppers shares goes to us, 25% is take from the total shares of the round (which causes other non-pool hoppers to get more), and the pool-hopper only gets 50% of what he/she would have gotten had then not been a pool hopper.  We're feeling this out to see how it works.  This new method gives MORE back to our users and less for us; and as for what we keep it ends up going back to the users anyhow...


The bitcoins that we do end up getting as a result of pool hoppers being penalized ends up going towards monthly giveaway, as in the $1,750 (which is about equal to 2 months of donations AND penalized pool-hoppers) I just spent last week for the 10 video cards that we are giving away for this month's Give-Away contest.

Everyone seems to think that Geebus and I make a living off the pool like DeepBit or Slush's pool, BUT WE DON'T!!  Geebus and I both have regular jobs like most people, and we run this pool on the side.  If we depended on the pool for our living, we'd both be without a home by now.

There is nothing stopping people from mining on our pool with a 0% donation set.  As long as you are not pool hopping, you don't get penalized. It's that simple. This way of doing it is much more fair to the loyal miners on our pool.  The only people that seem to have a problem with this is ..... pool-hoppers!  It's fairly obvious who is a pool hopper and who isn't, because only pool hoppers complain about this.  Lots of our loyal miners have already expressed that they like this as it rewards them for sticking around.  So feel free to complain all you want, but you'll just be outing yourself as a greedy pool-hopper.

As for all the non-pool hopping miners out there, if you want to be qualified to win a 6870 this month, you know where to come now. :)

Has anyone even looked at the details for solved blocks after the change? Users are being scammed big time. For instance, for block #144456 a total of 438 users had their reward halved, and only 9 got the full reward. 16 BTC went to the donations user (the pool).

That's a new and now known bug that we're working on fixing it asap.

I kinda freaked out when I woke up this morning and saw everyone was affected. I'll post back here when it's fixed.

It's funny how most people on this forum immediately freak out and think the worst possible thing  (scammer, snake-oil, thief, hackers, etc, etc) has happened when it's just a software bug... jeez.  Saying it's a 'scam' when it's very obvious that something went wrong seems premature.  Anyone that has half a brain and can stop and think for a minute or two, it's become very obvious that something went wrong.  Rhetorical question: Why would we run a 'scam' then make it that obvious by falsely showing everyone is a pool-hopper? We would not do that as it would be a completely stupid scam, blatantly obvious, and would have hundreds of previous solved blocks to backup such a ridiculous claim.

But I'll let people think for themselves while taking a look at all our previous solved blocks.

Do any other pools show ALL their solved block information??  If not, and we go by Grinders knee-jerk logic, then I guess they could all be scamming their users and are hiding the evidence.  But of course, that type of logic is unfounded and we would never say that.  It's reason's like this that we include the most information possible in our solved block history....to keep the level of trust in us higher than the other pools and the users of our pool honest.  

Further more, the level of transparency we offer has been very helpful in the past when we tracked down a user who was cheating other miners.  We had one of our users point out to us that another user had an efficiency of over 380%...which should never happen (another reason efficiency matters :P ).  We did a bit of digging, and found out there was a evil Tor exit node that was stealing getwork request and share submissions of miners who were/are using Tor.  Because of our detailed block solve history, we were able to see that this person had been doing this for at least a week before anyone caught it.  We rightfully banned that user and blocked their IP addresses.

So now I have to wonder, which other pools are being targeted by this Tor exit node??  I guess we'll never know because no other pool offers this level of transparency and detail for their solved block history.  Just one more reason for users to trust our pool before believing a unfounded and slanderous claim like "Users are being scammed big time" from someone who obviously doesn't understand how having a open, transparent, and highly detailed solved block history keeps everyone honest.

1) We didn't scam anybody. We never have and we never will.
2) The bug has since been fixed and both rounds rolled back to give full credit of shares to all users (even pool hoppers).
3) You're kind of an ass.

stop right there
I meant hopping on from 0 to 23

even with the penalty it's more profitable than 24/7 mining
http://hoppersden.info/entries/18-How-to-hop-3-the-50-50-tax

so with bithopper you'd set the pool to mine_deepbit and penalty of 2
I personally don't want to do this knowing that you set up this system so that hopping still continues, but the pool makes money on it

Dammit iopq, now everyone knows!

I didn't read anything about miners you've classified as pool hoppers not being eligible to win the 6870. Was that somewhere in your tl;dr post or are you just making up rules on the fly again?

To quote the rules of the contest, which were originally posted June 4th, and updated Sept. 1st:

And the 2nd note, which is attached to the "flagged repeatedly as a pool hopper":

My fault, didn't see that in the post.


Well yes, but my point was that anti hopping measures were affecting donating miners (me) even before you made them public. I thought you were ok with hopping and had given you a 2% donation from the start. I wouldn't be too happy mining anywhere pool ops trialled things like this before they told the miners.

Miners who donated were excluded from being penalized. Donations exclude you from receiving a penalty, not from the measures we put in place to prevent it. We've gone on record numerous times to state our opposition to pool hoppers and have never once said we were okay with it. We simply provided an option to remove the penalty. We have since chosen to remove that option in favor of the current method... which we informed our users of immediately upon changing it, and within the first 2 hours of the round, where anti-pool hopping measures don't apply anyway.

Are you guys getting DDoSed again, or is it just maintenance going on?