Solo Mining - Confirming that it's working?

[lemosax]

Hey folks... I've had experience so far with pooled mining using the poclbm client in Ubuntu so I'm used to the frequent status information showing timestamps and "accepted" as each share is submitted successfully.  Out of curiosity, I'm trying solo mining among several machines (actually for namecoins but the software is basically the same).  I have the namecoind daemon running on one of the machines, rpc user/pass and port configured, daemon=1, server=1.

The poclbm clients all connect without error and show a hash rate in the expected range, but nothing else.  Should they show frequent update information as I see with pooled mining or is this normal?  I poked around in the namecoind program but can't find any command to show definitively if I'm really mining or not.  My assumption is that I am because getinfo shows a connection count of 8, the correct difficulty and current block number.  Is that all the normal feedback I'd get when mining solo?

Thanks!!

[1715015527]

1715015527

[brunoshady]

I believe that when you're on a pool, the pool splits one block in several shares and pass it to the clients, so they can calculate them...
If you're mining solo, you will calculate the whole block by yourself, so, no shares...


But I might be wrong

[nebiki]

that's the same question i have had when i've set up my solo miner. apparently you don't see anything at all until you actually generate a block. that's not really assuring, a gui for nice statistics and numbers to look at would be very appreciated. not that the stats would help you generate a block, but it would be awesome to actually know there's something going on.

[lemosax]

Thanks for the replies!  I may try setting up a rudimentary installation of a pool software on one of the machines so I can at least see what's really going on.  I don't need to track who did what, but it's nice to see those little successful chunks as a confirmation of work done.

[FreeJAC]

Pool and solo are pretty much the same. Instead of pointing to your local system you are pointing to a remote system that's it. Once you solve a block you get 50 BTC when locally instead of fractions of BTC from pools that is pretty much the only difference. 

[lemosax]

Pool and solo are pretty much the same. Instead of pointing to your local system you are pointing to a remote system that's it. Once you solve a block you get 50 BTC when locally instead of fractions of BTC from pools that is pretty much the only difference. 

Thanks.  That confirms my understanding of the concept.  I guess what surprised me was that pool mining with poclbm looks like this:

17/06/2011 23:05:37, fd94be7d, accepted
17/06/2011 23:05:46, long poll: new block 00000c5220f6a603
17/06/2011 23:06:06, ac91fa5f, accepted
17/06/2011 23:06:11, c3050ae0, accepted
17/06/2011 23:06:26, a4408403, accepted
17/06/2011 23:06:31, 60eff26b, accepted
17/06/2011 23:06:39, d59cfbbd, accepted
17/06/2011 23:06:45, 8e660ab0, accepted
293182 khash/s

While solo mining just looks like this:

284757 khash/s


The lack of a flowing status is kind of puzzling once you've become accustomed to it.