The big question remains unanswered:  Did the abnormally high rejects stop after restarting your miner?

I'm still trying to figure out exactly why some miners are freaking out and others are not.  It almost seems like they're keeping the old DNS entries (that go directly to a backend) and adding the round robin on top of it, so some shares go back to old IPs that they shouldn't.

I had a warning up for a few hours, guess I should put it back up.  It looks like some miners threw a fit with the DNS change.  mine2 and mine3 point to the exact same servers right now.  A simple restart seemed to fix all issues for the miners that were affected.

EDIT:  One thing to note is that the new servers have one quirk that shouldn't affect an average user.  The new servers direct you to a backend based on your source IP.  This means if your IP changes a lot (TOR?), these new servers can cause havoc to your reject rates.  "Other" means the share received by the server did not come from that server.

If you are in a situation where your outgoing IP changes at random (not dynamic IP, more like a network where your outbound IP can bounce between 2 or more connections on any given packet), please send me a PM and I'll work on setting you up with a special connection.

Exactly what Tycho said.  I don't know why there was even mention of the two in the same sentence.  The only thing relating the two is that the first few rounds of ASICs might be able to solo mine with reasonable control over variance, but if ASICs are really it's only a matter of time until everybody is pointing ASICs at pools to beat variance just like they do with GPUs today.

p2pool will likely need to be forked to have a chance to handle ASICs.  The p2pool adjusted difficulty will cause too much variance for anybody not using an ASIC.  One fork for people using ASICs, one for GPUs would be the easiest solution I can think of.  You can't count on every ASIC user to play nice and elect to use a higher difficulty.

Summary of Recent Changes
The last 48 hours have had some large changes to BTC Guild's server setup.  The following is a list of what has changed, what to do if you have any problems in the new setup.

Changes/Updates
1) BTC Guild is now using many load balancing servers in round robin DNS.  All DNS entries (except de.btcguild.com) have been updated to use the round robin load balancing.
2) There is now a payout confirmation page for BTC and NMC withdrawals, warning users that some exchanges may not allow you to reuse an address.
3) Database improvements have taken place in many areas, drastically increasing website performance for some of the routine tasks.

Problems/Fixes
1) Port 80 mining was broken for approximately 10 hours due to the new load balancing setup.  To resume port 80 mining, change your server from mine2/mine3, to 'port80.btcguild.com'
2) If you are seeing a large number of 'Unknown' rejected shares, please restart your miners.  It seems that some miners (exact clients/versions not yet determined) will add the new DNS entries from round robin, but still keep the old IP as well, meaning it might submit shares to the wrong server.  Restarting the miner should resolve the issue.


Aside from the above, I am encouraging users to stop using direct IP to connect their miners if possible.  There are still a couple users mining on an IP that has been inactive for weeks.  Please use the hostname (btcguild.com or port80.btcguild.com) to connect.  If you must use an IP to connect, please update to 107.21.115.160.



UPDATE:  Some emails are going out to the top users of BTC Guild to provide a way to bypass the load balancing/proxy layer.  As time goes on, more users will be given the credentials.  If you receive the email, please do not post a copy of it here, and do not provide the addresses to anybody else.

A confirmation page has been added for manual NMC and BTC withdrawal requests.

Actually, you looked just after I discovered (and fixed) the issue.  Port 80 mining is one of those very rare cases, so when doing a massive overhaul on server setup, it wasn't something I was thinking about.  This morning I woke up to an email about Port 80 mining being broken, so I immediately went to work to correct the error since I knew exactly what was causing it.

If you have to mine on port 80, yes.  Port 80 no longer works when pointed at mine2 or mine3.btcguild.com, due to the overhaul of how the load balancing works.

Port 80 users:  Change your mining server to:  port80.btcguild.com

The new load balancers rest on 'btcguild.com', and all DNS entries have been moved to that round robin.  Because of this, port 80 on the load balancers must redirect users to https://www.btcguild.com (due to the frequency of people not typing in 'www').

port80.btcguild.com will allow you to continue mining on port 80, and also experience the benefit of load balancing across the multiple backends.

The new load balancer setup had a few hiccups at first yesterday, but the last 8 hours have gone very smoothly.  I did find out that port 80 mining broke as a result, so I am working on correcting this ASAP.  Additionally, I will be adding a withdrawal confirmation screen that clearly displays your withdrawal address and mentions the warning about some exchanges not allowing you to reuse an address.

It's just a display fault.  It will start to rebuild the 24 hour earnings over the next day.  When I fixed the code used to generate graphs & calculate 24 hour earnings, I forgot to update the NMC side with it.

Please try again, I've been doing a lot of backend work the last 48 hours, which included taking out one of the backend servers that ran a namecoind (used to validate your address).  I've updated the page to point to a different namecoind server, so it should work now.

The 24 Hour Earnings stat is currently incorrect for namecoins.  Fixing it shortly (it will take 24 hours for the number to be accurate again).

They also tend to have well setup systems that operate at high efficiency.  I'd bet the average 5 GH/s+ miners put less load on the server than an average 1 GH/s user .

Continued work happening on the load balancers today.  As with yesterday, anybody pointed at a specific server (mine1-3) should be fine.  This is only currently affecting people mining at the generic 'btcguild.com' hostname.  Similar to yesterday, this shouldn't cause any service interruption, and should at most result in a disconnected longpoll or a couple of rejected shares.

Thanks for the compliments on the pool .  I've always tried to keep the site providing as many of the vital statistics in one location, without becoming difficult to read/scan.

As for a namecoin wallet, unfortunately I haven't been able to find something that is quite as user friendly as Bitcoin's client.  Most users that actually use namecoin do so with the command line client (namecoind).  As Smoovius mentioned, most users simply use a withdrawal address for a namecoin exchange when they want to trade their namecoins for BTC, avoiding the need to run namecoin on their local machine at all.  Just be careful, since many (all?) namecoin exchanges use temporary addresses, meaning you would have to get a new withdrawal address and set it on BTC Guild for each withdrawal.

Yes, it looks like implementing the load balancers caused some small issues with some of the filters on the servers.  Most traffic went through, but it would occasionally drop some packets entirely, and this morning it looks like the DB server was dropping packets from mine2 for a while.  It did eventually catch up.

I've tweaked the settings on all 3 servers this morning, so this shouldn't be a problem going forward.

You can exchange namecoins on a namecoin exchange like Bitparking (https://exchange.bitparking.com/main).  They're not worth much at the moment (~0.003 BTC per NMC), though sometimes they get a spike in trade volume which temporarily makes Namecoins a decent bonus (1%+).

BTC Guild is a merged mining pool (like Slush, OzCoin, EclipseMC, and many others).  You earn Bitcoins and Namecoins simultaneously.  You get just as much BTC as you would at any other 5% PPS fee pool.  Merged mining takes a valid Bitcoin hash and applies it to Namecoin as well.  No speed is lost.  No coins are lost.

The front page explains it quite clearly.  Namecoins are BONUS income.  You're free to ignore them, but if you convert them to BTC on the exchange you'll end up with an extra ~0.5-1% BTC depending on the exchange rate at the time.