I switch my GPU miner (poclbm) between pooled and solo mining in about a 2:1 ratio respectively because I appreciate the convenience and predictability of pooled mining, but I think solo mining is still important for the mining ecosystem.  Over the past two months I've found four blocks (and been paid out more than that) in Slush's pool, but haven't found any blocks when mining solo.

I'm well aware that this isn't statistically ridiculous, but it does leave me with the nagging concern that I've configured something wrong in my solo setup.  The only difference between the two is the batch file I use to launch poclbm, which adds the host parameter for pooled mining (I use identical username and password for my local bitcoin login to simplify things), and the software appears to run identically for both of them, excepting the regular hashes that are found during pooled mining.  For example, the hash rate is identical, and no errors are produced.

Is the fact that I'm successfully finding blocks for the pool sufficient to show that everything is okay?  I suspect that it is but thought I'd double-check nonetheless to make sure my solo results are just 'bad' luck.  Can anyone lend a deeper insight?


sincerely,
eMansipater

It would be nice to have a test network with a low difficulty (maybe just a single node) that could be used to validate miner implementations.

Thanks, Slush.


testnet is a good point--I didn't think to doublecheck with that, but all seems to be well.  Just a matter of time now.  sigh.