Testnet broken?

[JollyGreen]

I went all night and my test net faucet transaction never came thru and it looks like no blocks have been generated!  Is this just because no one is generating on the testnet?  If no one is generating, should we send real BTC to miners that generate on the test network to create an incentive for them to do so?  I can only pull off 1khash/sec thru the bitcoin client, so it currently takes me 1 1/2+ days to generate a block.  Seems like it would be beneficial to have an active testnet for all the features everyone is working on.

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[FatherMcGruder]

The fact that the testnet helps strengthen bitcoin is incentive enough. Let's publicize it more. I intend to volunteer some of my CPU power.

[Mike Hearn]

Difficulty on the testnet is quite high currently.

I'm working on a testnet-in-a-box that will give you a few thousand coins and a few hundred blocks of difficulty 1 in a zip file. Then you can set your own computer generating and get a block pretty quickly on your own private network. If you have a GPU you can even create blocks every few seconds for instant confirmations.

[Mike Hearn]

It's done: http://sourceforge.net/projects/bitcoin/files/Bitcoin/testnet-in-a-box/