Setting up a pool server

[gateway]

Hi, I was wondering if anyone had a guide or pointers on how to set up your own pooling server, I want to set one up my friend and I can mine with, and eventually turn it into something others can join.

I have several ubuntu servers with lots of ram and disk space at various hosts around the world.

I know their is p2pool, but is that what sites like btcguild, or any other pool that users can join run or is their some other underlying software that is the backbone for the system?

Ideally I would build my own front end which is quite easy it seems since a lot of the commands are json ..

but anyone point me into a direction for software to start a private pool system on ubuntu which cgminer and others can connect to?

[Anonymouss]

subscribing

[gateway]

So far I found this as the backend.. http://poolserverj.org/

[Graet]

So far I found this as the backend.. http://poolserverj.org/

which is very unmaintained
stratum_mining by slush or eliopool by luke-jr are current and supported and work with version 2 blocks (if you don't know what that means you need to do a lot of research before opening a pool)
there are some free front ends around, Simplecoin and mmfce front end spring to mind, though from memory both need some work to make secure - you can of course write your own.

I must warn there is more to running a pool than owning some servers and putting some pool software on them.
what payout system are you considering?
Do you have plenty of Bitcoins and are you willing to put them into paying miners in times of bad luck or other issues?

OP
What hardware do you and your friends have? gpus are being driven out of mining by ASIC devices, a 20Gh pool in a 100Th (currently at 65Th up from 22ish Th before asics started appearing) network wont find many blocks
good luck in your venture
Graet

[gateway]

@Graet

Thanks for taking the time to respond.  Yea I need to do homework and was already familiar with the 2 block version change.

Maybe you can help with some clarification.

You state that I need to have some back up btc's to fund bad luck, im assuming this is the case if the server dies, database of users gets wiped etc..
I have about 10k in BTC right now but as I saw mainly wanted to start this as a private area for my friends about 30 of us pushing about 10G and I have an
avalon on order, plus just bought 20+ chips for a diy project if that comes though.

I think im leaning on stratum system, eliopool is interesting but debugging and seems much easier with the stratum protocol and most miners now are enabling this, not to mention the packets go over tcp vs http proto.

I'm a full blown web developer of 10 years so Ill look at simple coin and prob take the things they did and roll my own into much more secure front end (well as secure as secure things can be .  I'm not sure what mmfce front end refers to.

I would prob set up the private one with a small server to see how things go and develop over time on this, ideally if i ever wanted to push it to more people or if they wanted to join prob be a standard stack of 2 load balancers, a few web front ends, backend, and nosql db.

The question I cannot find is that you set up a wallet lets say the sites wallet, people join, they mine for that wallet and that wallet gets filled with btc, the users shares are tracked, and they have an option to pay out, aka send from master wallet to users wallet.. is that how it goes, or is my thinking wrong?

[tiktoc]

The question I cannot find is that you set up a wallet lets say the sites wallet, people join, they mine for that wallet and that wallet gets filled with btc, the users shares are tracked, and they have an option to pay out, aka send from master wallet to users wallet.. is that how it goes, or is my thinking wrong?

Yup basically, but I assume that they mine straight to a cold wallet(s), and have another hot wallet they use for payments.

Someone else this week forked simple coin was and was planing on upgrading it(post in theforums somewhere about it).

If you search the custom hardware forum there are two basic tutes on setting up stratum-mining or eloipool.

There is a couple of others around as well for other pools.

[lbr]

I've tried
pushpool - works, but does not support stratum
poolserverj - does not work out of the box, due to GetBlockCount(or GetBlockNumber) is obsolete, also latest source does not match latest relased binary, eventually I got it to "work", but several miners experienced issues with long polling
p2pool - works, except it publishes stats on the public IP/port, I've modified code a bit so it does not; So.. I choose p2pool.

also there is Eloipool and ecoinpool, Eloi looks like it is maintaned, have not tried it cause did not have CentOS/RHEL SSH access at that time.

[eleuthria]

poolserverj - does not work out of the box, due to GetBlockCount(or GetBlockNumber) is obsolete, also latest source does not match latest relased binary, eventually I got it to "work", but several miners experienced issues with long polling

Don't forget poolserverj doesn't create valid blocks due to the version2 block switch.