[1500 TH] p2pool: Decentralized, DoS-resistant, Hop-Proof pool

[echris1]

I am testing my central p2pool node, finally on a real linux machine :-)

Strangely, p2pool reports way-too-low hashrates. I mine with constant 290Mh/s, all day now. P2pool says:

2012-03-19 19:02:01.592058 New work for worker! Difficulty: 0.107541 Share difficulty: 667.763165 Total block value: 50.028282 BTC including 39 transactions
2012-03-19 19:02:02.060129 P2Pool: 17395 shares in chain (17175 verified/17399 total) Peers: 10 (0 incoming)
2012-03-19 19:02:02.060293 Local: 11354kH/s in last 10.0 minutes Local dead on arrival: ~15.4% (2-40%) Expected time to share: 2.9 days
2012-03-19 19:02:02.060357  Shares: 0 (0 orphan, 0 dead) Stale rate: Efficiency: Current payout: 0.7961 BTC
2012-03-19 19:02:02.060422  Pool: 314GH/s Stale rate: 7.1% Expected time to block: 5.7 hours

I may or may not find a share every few hours. But it is in the two-digit Mh/s range all the time, thats what bugs me.. Cant be the dynamic difficulty adjustment, since it says "kH/s"? Lost here..

--version:
6b4c15a

Ente

edit: silly smilies in quote

You have a pretty high local dead on arrival.  I don't know what miner your using, but with cgminer recommended settings are 1 GPU thread (-g 1) and lowering your intensity a bit, that helps with that.  The other part I don't really get is how you have such a high payout with such a low hashrate.  According the http://p2pool.info/ you would need almost 5GH/s to get that.

----edit---
ugh, i see the smilies you mean now, i need to go and find how to turn those off...

[1714125622]

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[1714125622]

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[1714125622]

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[Ente]

Yeah, that is pretty bad.  To me, it looks like your miner is using your CPU and not your GPU.  Is your miner reporting normal speeds?

Miner (Guiminer, poclbm) says between 280 and 290Mh/s constantly for hours now. It solved 330 diff-1 shares in the last hour, which seems about right. A 300Mh/s miner should solve 250 diff-1 shares per hour.. Miner says zero stales too..

Ente

EDIT:

what the..
After it ran at 10% the whole day, now it gets faster and faster! Its at 200Mh/s already! Just at it finished "verifying" the sharechain? Might that be the reason? It initially downloaded the sharechain in minutes, but took at least two days to "verify" each shareblock, one after another?

EDIT2:

It stabilized at 250Mh/s. All fine here now.
Strangely, the /graphs says it was right between 250 and 300Mh/s all day? hmm..

Thank you for your help and thoughts!

Ente

[DeathAndTaxes]

I don't believe guiminer works properly w/ p2pool but I could be wrong.  At one time other miners (except cgminer) had problems w/ p2pool but it looks like they have all been patched (except guiminer).  Still why use guiminer?  It hasn't been updated in 6 months and likely never will.

[Ente]

I don't believe guiminer works properly w/ p2pool but I could be wrong.  Still why use guiminer.  It hasn't been updated in 6 months and likely never will.

I'm glad I convinced him to use p2pool (although oh-so-horrible variance and payout), convinced him that a shell isnt evil, and convinced him that a central node isnt more likely to crash than local nodes on every miner..
He still prefers a Gui and sticks to windows..

When I have it all set up with a central monitoring point for each miner I'll see if we switch to a a more recent (shell-) miner.. ;-)

Ente

[01BTC10]

I don't believe guiminer works properly w/ p2pool but I could be wrong.  Still why use guiminer.  It hasn't been updated in 6 months and likely never will.

Tested GuiMiner on LinuxCoin with my p2pool. Doesn't works.

[Red Emerald]

b) Since when p2pool starts up it displays a lot of "house keeping" type messages having something like

Code:

2012-03-19 9:00:43 Donating 0.5% of gross revenue for the continued support and upkeep or p2pool.  Thank you for your support

or

Code:

2012-03-19 9:00:43 You currently have donations disabled.  p2pool is open source and provided at no cost however your financial contribution ensures continued support and upgrades.  Please consider a manual donation or enable automatic donations with the command line argument --give-author <pct amount>. 

I think this would be a really simple thing to implement.  If someone doesn't read the --help and then doesn't read the startup messages, then they don't deserve to complain.  Of course, I don't think they should complain about 0.5% to the author anyways.

[Syke]

1. I'm a cheapkate.
2. I'm lazy.

If the default donation was 0% I would never change it. A meager default donation (which can be turned off)  in exchange for developing the awesome p2pool is an extremely fair request. About 40% of the network has already turned off the donation. I'm afraid if the default was off, the donations would drop considerably. At less than 1 btc per day, the donations are quite small for all the hard work developing p2pool.

Leave the default donation on.

[runeks]

I agree that the default donation should be left on.

I also agree that the fact that donation is on by default should be in the first post of this thread, clearly stated so that it doesn't come as a surprise to anyone (it came as a surprise to me). The criticism doesn't revolve around the author being undeserving of the 0.5%, it pertains to people not being informed of the fact that they are donating. I agree this should be changed. The suggestions of DeathAndTaxes would be sufficient, I think.

[coretechs]

Assume that part of all the subsidies you have received cover the 0.5% default donation, get over it, and continue mining with p2pool, keeping the 0.5% donation enabled.  

I also agree it should be added to the first post for people who don't read basic instructions for software they are running.

[Shadow383]

My node luck's been horrible 

Running 2.5-4Gh/s for the past couple of hours, one share found 

[NothinG]

As I was writing a PM to OP, I stumbled over my own theory.

Code:

Could you add something into the code for people to publish their version publicly?
I've got the public node list setup (http://nodes.p2pmine.com) and was wanting to sort the latest versions with the longest up-time.

Also, could you have a site that would also publish the most up-to-date version?

Actually, I guess in all essence the sourcecode is public and easily modifiable. So, who knows what version people are actually running...
Nevermind. _._

[dub0matic]

this just popped up does it mean anything.

2012-03-20 02:10:18.525000 ALERT: ('\x01\x00\x00\x00\xf6\xfacO\x00\x00\x00\x00\x
f2*EQ\x00\x00\x00\x00\xf3\x03\x00\x00\xf2\x03\x00\x00\x00P\xc3\x00\x00|\xc4\x00\
x00\x00\x88\x13\x00\x00\x00JURGENT: security fix for Bitcoin-Qt on Windows: http
://bitcoin.org/critfix\x00', '0E\x02!\x00\xf4\xbd>d\xa1\x07w\x99\xc8\xd7Z\xa5\xb
fGUd\x93\xceXF\x96P\x98\xea"\xa68\xbfW\xde\x8c\xa9\x02 -\xda\xe4\xa4\xc9-N\xe4\x
fa&G\xdb\x94dQ\x819\xdd\xd4\x8fW\xe0\xa0Q\x04Ew\tr\xa2Y\x0b')

[NothinG]

this just popped up does it mean anything.

2012-03-20 02:10:18.525000 ALERT: ('\x01\x00\x00\x00\xf6\xfacO\x00\x00\x00\x00\x
f2*EQ\x00\x00\x00\x00\xf3\x03\x00\x00\xf2\x03\x00\x00\x00P\xc3\x00\x00|\xc4\x00\
x00\x00\x88\x13\x00\x00\x00JURGENT: security fix for Bitcoin-Qt on Windows: http
://bitcoin.org/critfix\x00', '0E\x02!\x00\xf4\xbd>d\xa1\x07w\x99\xc8\xd7Z\xa5\xb
fGUd\x93\xceXF\x96P\x98\xea"\xa68\xbfW\xde\x8c\xa9\x02 -\xda\xe4\xa4\xc9-N\xe4\x
fa&G\xdb\x94dQ\x819\xdd\xd4\x8fW\xe0\xa0Q\x04Ew\tr\xa2Y\x0b')

Looks like an attempt at an exploit.
Do you have everything updated to the latest (Bitcoin & P2Pool)?

[Krak]

this just popped up does it mean anything.

2012-03-20 02:10:18.525000 ALERT: ('\x01\x00\x00\x00\xf6\xfacO\x00\x00\x00\x00\x
f2*EQ\x00\x00\x00\x00\xf3\x03\x00\x00\xf2\x03\x00\x00\x00P\xc3\x00\x00|\xc4\x00\
x00\x00\x88\x13\x00\x00\x00JURGENT: security fix for Bitcoin-Qt on Windows: http
://bitcoin.org/critfix\x00', '0E\x02!\x00\xf4\xbd>d\xa1\x07w\x99\xc8\xd7Z\xa5\xb
fGUd\x93\xceXF\x96P\x98\xea"\xa68\xbfW\xde\x8c\xa9\x02 -\xda\xe4\xa4\xc9-N\xe4\x
fa&G\xdb\x94dQ\x819\xdd\xd4\x8fW\xe0\xa0Q\x04Ew\tr\xa2Y\x0b')

Looks like an attempt at an exploit.
Do you have everything updated to the latest (Bitcoin & P2Pool)?

Yeah, that sounds like the problem that was fixed in 0.6 RC4.

[dub0matic]

ahh yes i needed to update bitcoin went to .5.3.1

[echris1]

this just popped up does it mean anything.

2012-03-20 02:10:18.525000 ALERT: ('\x01\x00\x00\x00\xf6\xfacO\x00\x00\x00\x00\x
f2*EQ\x00\x00\x00\x00\xf3\x03\x00\x00\xf2\x03\x00\x00\x00P\xc3\x00\x00|\xc4\x00\
x00\x00\x88\x13\x00\x00\x00JURGENT: security fix for Bitcoin-Qt on Windows: http
://bitcoin.org/critfix\x00', '0E\x02!\x00\xf4\xbd>d\xa1\x07w\x99\xc8\xd7Z\xa5\xb
fGUd\x93\xceXF\x96P\x98\xea"\xa68\xbfW\xde\x8c\xa9\x02 -\xda\xe4\xa4\xc9-N\xe4\x
fa&G\xdb\x94dQ\x819\xdd\xd4\x8fW\xe0\xa0Q\x04Ew\tr\xa2Y\x0b')

This isn't an attempt at an exploit, its more like a public service announcement letting you know about a vulnerability so you can upgrade.

I believe the stuff around the text is a PGP signature, but I could be wrong.

[NothinG]

this just popped up does it mean anything.

2012-03-20 02:10:18.525000 ALERT: ('\x01\x00\x00\x00\xf6\xfacO\x00\x00\x00\x00\x
f2*EQ\x00\x00\x00\x00\xf3\x03\x00\x00\xf2\x03\x00\x00\x00P\xc3\x00\x00|\xc4\x00\
x00\x00\x88\x13\x00\x00\x00JURGENT: security fix for Bitcoin-Qt on Windows: http
://bitcoin.org/critfix\x00', '0E\x02!\x00\xf4\xbd>d\xa1\x07w\x99\xc8\xd7Z\xa5\xb
fGUd\x93\xceXF\x96P\x98\xea"\xa68\xbfW\xde\x8c\xa9\x02 -\xda\xe4\xa4\xc9-N\xe4\x
fa&G\xdb\x94dQ\x819\xdd\xd4\x8fW\xe0\xa0Q\x04Ew\tr\xa2Y\x0b')

This isn't an attempt at an exploit, its more like a public service announcement letting you know about a vulnerability so you can upgrade.

I believe the stuff around the text is a PGP signature, but I could be wrong.

Looks like hex obfuscation of malicious code.
I could be wrong though, it could just be a warning.


http://www.technicalinfo.net/papers/CSS.html

Code:

The hex value of a character may be used, often done for non-printable characters. Such as: 
x00 Null bytes for truncating strings 
x04 EOF for faking the end of files 
x08 Backspace x0a New Line for extra command execution 
x0d New Line for extra command execution 
x1b Escape character for breaking out of procedures 
x20 Spaces for faking URLs and other names 
x7f Delete

[runeks]

Looks like hex obfuscation of malicious code.
I could be wrong though, it could just be a warning.

Can you recognize malicious code from hex?
I know these messages include a signature, so we can verify that this message indeed came from the authors. So it would make sense if the extra data is a signature (which will not be ASCII).

[NothinG]

Looks like hex obfuscation of malicious code.
I could be wrong though, it could just be a warning.

Can you recognize malicious code from hex?
I know these messages include a signature, so we can verify that this message indeed came from the authors. So it would make sense if the extra data is a signature (which will not be ASCII).

I can only recognize that its obfuscation and not a normal print out of something.

[Edit]: Alternatively, maybe there is an exploit that allowed a popup ( which would explain "ALERT:" ), thus the reason for the obfuscation. Again, I haven't deciphered the code...so, I could just be blowing theories out the window.

[runeks]

I think this is just how Python prints out non-printable characters.

The "ALERT" is part of what p2pool prints out, it isn't part of the message it seems.

EDIT: Here it is: https://github.com/forrestv/p2pool/blob/master/p2pool/bitcoin/p2p.py#L141
Maybe p2pool is parsing the message incorrectly, so that some binary data ends up in the message part?

EDIT2: Indeed. The string that p2pool prints as the message contains additional information before the actual message string: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Protocol_specification#alert