The pool still mostly sucks.  

Actually in the recent month or so, it is fairly stable and if it messed up, I restart it.  I usually get to support emails within 7 days or so.  I'm still the original guy who ran it, but it has fallen into deep neglect.

Once I figure out the details, I will be shutting the pool down.  But basically, once I announce it, it will be something like 30 days left to mine, 60 days left to claim bitcoins on the site that may be in your account, and then 90 days until I officially close accounts (can still claim coins.)  Once I officially announce, notices will be posted on the site, all members with balances and/or recent mining activity will be emailed, etc.

You can now make account modifications that require your PIN number again.  Email burningtoad@arsbitcoin.com if you need any assistance.

I plan on getting to it today, sorry for the wait.  If you have something urgent, you can email be at burningtoad@arsbitcoin.com

Hello, it appears a malicious users has logged in to 22 different accounts.  Because of the limited nature (vs all 4000+ accounts) I believe the hacker either used some brute force method, or an existing leak of usernames/passwords to try and log into accounts.  For example, the MTGox leak a while back.

I've temporarily disabled all PIN, Address, and Payout changes, so you will not be able to change your password at the moment (but neither will any hacker.)  I sent an email out to the affected accounts that I know about at the moment.

Once the malicious user got into an account, he brute forced address change attempts by trying different PIN numbers.  If he was successful, he then sent a manual payment to the new address.

So far, this appears to have only happened once (but could have been a couple more, still looking), as he could only try one PIN per second due to server restrictions.

I'll be working on changes to make this attack not possible in the future, and account changes will be disabled until then.

Malicious user information:
IP: 79.172.242.141
Malicious address: http://blockexplorer.com/address/17JuYfk8bWUHvAfRv5eF7zUic1g3qrDobz
I believe this represents the majority of any bitcoins stolen from this attack.

Hey guys.  I'm very sorry to have dropped off the map lately.  I've been having a number of personal issues.  One of which has affected my ability to be very social or responsive.  I really appreciate the emails and messages about trying to help out with hosting and anything at all, and I'm sorry that I have not responded to them individually.  I also really liked the community we had in the IRC channel, and I'm sorry that I've left it behind at the moment.  It looks like a lot of people have left the pool, which is completely understandable given its current condition, and I think some have just stopped mining in general.  I'm still glad to have talked to a lot of you and fun with bitcoin for a while.

Pool status as of now is about the same as it has been recently.  I try to keep it up and running, but stability has not been the greatest.  Honestly with the shape of the code base, database, etc not being easy to understand for someone else, and needed bugfixes, etc, and me not keeping up with the bitcoin scene lately, I'm not sure that transferring to another host or passing the pool on to someone else is a good idea.  The most likely result is a shutdown of the pool eventually, but I'm still not certain.  Probably be continuing the way it is over the holidays, with not much happening.  I may shut down server2 to try and save some money since we could handle all the traffic on one server now.  If I did this, I would point the DNS so that it would just use server 1, so you shouldn't have to worry about anything.  However, it would disable port 80 mining (which was down for a while anyways I think....)

I still respond to password reset emails, etc, though it tends to take me a while. 

On the bright side, looks like bitcoin price is up a little?  Thats good for everyone.  I haven't been watching it, but I would like to sell the donations I've received at some point so I can make back some of these server costs   At this point its just my own fault though, with all the offers of help, etc, to make it cheaper and such.  I don't like running a sub-par service, as it isn't cost efficient, and of course doesn't inspire people to donate since the service hasn't been good lately.  This is the most likely reason for an eventual shutdown, as I need to either improve things a lot and try and make this cost effective again, or I should just close it down to stop losing money.

If ArsBitcoin does get closed down, I will of course give notice, try to email all the accounts, provide probably 30 days of time for people to use the website to cashout, and probably 90 days of time for people to email me for manual account verification / cashout, etc.  Like i've said, this would probably be a lot of work, so the pool chugs on for now

I guess you can tell I'm feeling a little better since i've actually said something... and been able to communicate.  What a wall of text....

Hello,

Sorry guys, the reality right now is:

1) I haven't done anything to improve the pool in at least a month.
2) All I've done is try and keep it up.  I usually get a text message when it messes up, but not always.  Each server (main and 2) seems to randomly fail occasionally (both PoolServerJ and pushpool.)  I haven't had time to try and figure out the root cause.  Basically PSJ/pushpool degrade after a while and need a restart.
3) I haven't done the numbers, but I'm probably losing money each day at the moment on this because EC2 is expensive and the BTC price is low.  The bill this last month was ~$400+ with the two servers + bandwidth costs.
4) I'm closer to bringing the pool down than I am to implementing merged mining or anything else.
5) I'm having some personal problems and issues just trying to do work for my real job, so the priority for this right now is very low.  In fact the pool is probably mostly still up (instead of being taken down) because it is more effort to take it down cleanly (provide notice, email everyone, resolve coin balances, etc.) than it is to keep it in its current state.

So, I apologize, but that is how things stand at the moment.  I can't guarantee anything for the future, i.e. whether I will take the pool down, or finally work on improving it, etc.

There were a few issues today with the scripts taking a lot longer than usual to run (causing login issues).  Also, the hashrate script had stopped running completely, so reported hashrates were wrong.

I think i've fixed things now, so hashrates should start coming back up. 

We seem to be back, after switching IPs and pointing the DNS to it.  Let me know if yall notice any issues.

Well, main server is unresponsive again.  Last time this happened, it was a hardware failure at Amazon.  Getting them to look at it again...

Sorry, nothing at the moment.  May be able to use PoolServerJ and a simple namecoind to do this, but last time I checked these were still a little iffy, and I haven't had time to check recently.

I've tried some additional fixes, so please let me know if yall notice continued issues after this post.

I'm sorry about not being around much or responding to emails.  I've been having a lot of personal issues which has caused this lack of attention to the pool.  I will try and remedy soon.

Sorry about all the issues with the servers.  On the main server, PSJ was maxing out CPU usage, and on Server 2 I was getting out of memory issues.

I've reverted to pushpool for now, and thats about all I can do.  I'm having some issues of my own at the moment.

I don't know if it is a PSJ issue, or perhaps a botnet or increased load or something, but i'll just have to see how pushpool works out.

Last month, ArsBitcoin (~800 GH/s or so last month?) used the following:

data transfer in    495.223 GB
data transfer out 676.921 GB

Some of that is probably backing up files and such, but probably not too much.

Sorry, I have to do something special to get port 80 working on Server 2.  8344 has been working fine, but I forgot about port 80.  Its is back now.

Amazon: "The instance is now in the stopped state as the host was irrecoverable. You can now start the instance and you will be back on a new, healthy host. "

We are back up now.

Also, I found the issue with why server 2 kept having issues (with pushpool and PSJ.)  The socket/file limit was still set very low.  Forgot to configure it like the main server.  That has been fixed now, so Server 2 shouldn't mess up periodically like it has been.

Got a response from amazon.  Seems to be a hardware failure.  They are investigating.  Hopefully i'll be able to restart the instance on different hardware soon.

The main server stopped responding.  Server2 relies on the main server for submitting shares, so we're completely down at the moment.

Not sure if it is a hosting issue, or if the DDoS started to point our way or some such.  Trying to get the main server back.

No, why would you want this?

Sorry, seems I forgot to reset the warning flag last time there was a server issue, so I didn't get a text message when Server2 was having trouble this time.  It is back now.

Alright, so not great results for Shadders, most likely because no one knew about this

"donate_amount";"date"
"3.7125716460477127";"2011-10-10"
"5.845001067834805";"2011-10-09"
"3.3776687214636683";"2011-10-08"
"3.260313908017318";"2011-10-07"
"3.0306043955643625";"2011-10-06"
"2.851349150199118";"2011-10-05"
"2.7467903676281";"2011-10-04"
"2.850080288336016";"2011-10-03"


This results in only 0.59 BTC, heh.  So... I will send off a 5.59 BTC donation to shadders so that he at least gets something.

On more positive notes, check out the last few days!  Barcode (l1l1l1l1l1l1l1l1l1ll1111l1l11 or whatever ) has been donating at 20% (maybe more, but I was away most of the weekend.)  He is now the top donor on the charts! https://arsbitcoin.com/statsDonate.php

Thanks!