Bitcoin Forum

Just curious... what are the "minimum requirements" would you think for running a large scale mining pool with 1,000+ workers?

Would you need more than one server?

Could it be done with pushpool/pushpoold? (Is there even a difference? I cannot find any reference to pushpoold on the net but some people mention it on these forums..?)

I think it would be more than enough. Sending work units to miners is not all that bandwidth intensive. But I'm wondering if it would be possible to increase your upstream capacity and lower your downstream capacity because upstream is what your future pool would be using the most.

Oh and congrats on trying to start a pool. I for one think that the more mining pools we have the better.

You would not need more than one server but for redundancy and reliability's sake it would be advised. Maybe you can setup a high availability cluster with 2 nodes? I dunno, the thing is that there are quite a few possible points of failure and if you can design the pool's infrastructure to be as resilient as possible then all the better :)

never heard of it, but if it's the standard naming concept, pushpoold is the daemon.

Thanks for the encouragement and advice!

I have two relatively fast servers laying around. I was thinking for protection against ddos attacks (which I fear would be likely) I could setup a firewall to only allow registered members (who have declared their static IP address on the website) to access the pool's servers.

It's not possible to upgrade the upload speed where I am currently, but I could always take this to Amazon's EC2 if it took off.

@Dayofswords: you're probably right! :S

But what about people who do not have static IPs? I doubt anyone would want to DDoS a tiny pool. If you get to the point where you have to worry about DDoS protection then you know "you've made it".

I think your approach is a smart one - smart small for now and if the pool "goes big" move it to Amazon EC2.

BitcoinPool.com started getting DDoS'd within a half an hour of going live with a combined speed of less than 5 GH/s. We've now been running for a few months and have yet to experience a day that we weren't getting DDoS'd to some degree. A pool will get DDoS'd, and generally speaking, the attacks will be frequent.

Wow, I am quite surprised to hear that! It is very sad indeed. Makes me wonder who the hell is conducting these DDoS attacks. Besides another pool operator, in whose interest is it to DDoS fledgling mining pools?

Any tips you can give us in regards to avoiding and mitigating DDoS attacks?

So news pools are desirable because some will fly under the radar and those who don't will divide the attack power of the DDoS between them. It's just a matter of providing enough targets to become too hard to take down :D

I have a few personal friends who are miners as well that I could start testing the pool with.

I agree with you there. The more pools there are, the tougher it will be to take them all down.

Instead of limiting the ip addresses via a firewall, I could probably setup something that bans an ip for 1 hour if you try and contact us more than once every 5 seconds. That still would mean even a small botnet of 10,000 computers could hit my site at 2,000 requests per second...  which is probably enough to take down a small server... hrmmm.

I invite any pool owners to post details about their recent DDOS attempts so that we can all better protect against them.

The US gov... or maybe paypal, is doing all this DDOS, hiring from russia and china and the like

That would be a very sneaky and evil thing to do. What would make it worse is that the US government has nearly unlimited funds to dump into DDoS attempts. However if anyone catches evidence of this there would be a huge PR shitstorm coming their way.

lol noone ever catches them xD and I wasn't really serious ::)

Heh, good!

There is too much tin foil hat thinking going on around here.

We are hardly 10,000 strong yet... I doubt that "they" have taken much notice.

+1

Annnnnnnnnnnnnnd, cue silence.

I guess most of us are just in this for the quick money then..?

Helping out other pools means yours makes a little less BTC per day, but will almost guarantee you don't threaten bitcoin by acquiring 50% market share.