How can I setup my own pool?

[antares]

Hi there...

I have a set of about 160 Machines which can each do about 25 MHash/s by CPU and another 80MH/s using their GPUs.
These computers are not used but still online during night time, so I considered setting up my own personal mining pool for them.

So I went to a *nix machine and setup bitcoind like that:
bitcoind -gen=0 -rpcuser=myusername -rpcpassword=somepassword -rpcallowip=* -server -daemon

I used rpcallowip=* because some of my machines are in different networking segments.
I also used -gen=0 because the server has loads of traffic and a decent internet connection but very limited computing power.

I then used the sample cpuminer to connect to those machines:
./minerd --url http://my.bitcoind.servers.ip:8332/ --threads 8 --userpass myusername:somepassword

this produces the following output:
[2011-06-06 17:45:37] HTTP request failed: The requested URL returned error: 500
[2011-06-06 17:45:37] json_rpc_call failed, retry after 30 seconds

if bitcoind ran for some minutes(I guess the above is because during those first minuts bitcoind is establishing a connection to the p2p network)
sometimes it shows
[2011-06-06 17:45:31] thread 1: 4415056 hashes, 903.55 khash/sec
[2011-06-06 17:45:36] thread 0: 4415056 hashes, 900.01 khash/sec
which seems to be quite ok for me, but then after some time again it goes back to HTTP error 500 and then exits after a few mis-tries.

What am I doing wrong?
How can I get it working constantly?
Is there any (*)nix based software that is dedicated for creating your own pool except for bitcoind?

[RaTTuS]

you bitcoind needs to have connections to the net to provide work - so make sure it has more than 0 -

[antares]

hi, the bitcoind runs on a DMZ host with 100MBits directly switched to the internet. So I suppose that it does have connections(also if I run the normal bitcoin GUI client, it gets about 150connections only seconds after startup.

Also: Is there any tool to query the bitcoind client for its stats(like total MH/s, Connections etc) like with a web interface that I can use or do I have to write my own?

[leepfrog]

Uhm you are aware of the electricity costs? If they are not your own the spike will certainly be recognized.
Example: assume each PC uses around 400 Watts:

160 PCs * 400 Watts * 12 h/day * 30 days = 23.040.000 Watt/h
This is 23.040 kW/h which at a cost of 0,20$/kwh would equal 4600USD additional electricity.

just saying..

[BombaUcigasa]

Just try to talk to your superiors and bribe them or somehow offer compensation at current mined bitcoin value, and keep all you reap. They can't do it without you...

[grue]

you should be running a mining proxy, that connects to a pool. Even with that much hash rate, it's going to take forever to get a block.

[RobertRibbeck]

Uhm you are aware of the electricity costs? If they are not your own the spike will certainly be recognized.
Example: assume each PC uses around 400 Watts:

160 PCs * 400 Watts * 12 h/day * 30 days = 23.040.000 Watt/h
This is 23.040 kW/h which at a cost of 0,20$/kwh would equal 4600USD additional electricity.

just saying..

A little high on your power estimate and electric cost
mold simperon runs 110w and my newer dualcore intel 120w
both running the cpu @ 100%

I got 6 older machines runnng in the back room not taking 400W

my elect is 10.5 ..total bill (all charges) / kw used

Just saying
you cant guess by power supply rating  you have to get a "kill a watt" meter & actually measure what it takes

[film2240]

I also wish to setup my own pool bit this is for different reasons to the original poster.

Long story short,I need to start asap so how do I setup a mining pool with 2 comps.1 is an MBP mid 2010 and other is my PC.

[martok]

which seems to be quite ok for me, but then after some time again it goes back to HTTP error 500 and then exits after a few mis-tries.

What am I doing wrong?
How can I get it working constantly?
Is there any (*)nix based software that is dedicated for creating your own pool except for bitcoind?

With 160 machines all being CPU miners, you'll want to see what the askrates are on those boxes. bitcoind can only handle so many getwork requests and they currently all occur synchronously. For this specific workload, I would look into multiminer as it is able to take a getwork and break it down for CPU miners. Pushpool is an option but that just moves the getwork load down the chain slightly.

Bitcoind is appropriate for what you are doing, you just need to look at scalability.