Dear Pool Miners, general vertans, and everyone else,
From just after 2am (BST) on Sunday 6th April to the afternoon the pool suffered outages of mining due to a failure of communication between the wallet and the mining service.
ERROR bitcoin_rpc_manager # Check Height -- Pool 0 Down!
ERROR bitcoin_rpc_manager # Problem with Pool 0 -- NO ALTERNATE POOLS!!!
During this time the website was fully operational, and payouts were processed.
It was originally thought that a recent change to the operation of the server to off load some of the mining traffic to a separate process was responsible. Therefore the configuration was returned to the previous setting. This however was not the full reason.
This only became clear when the same issue again occured at around 2am (BST) on Monday 7th April. The downtime this time was only until the morning when it was discovered - though again inconveniencing our miners greatly (for which we can only apologise).
After obtaining additional technical advise, we were advised of a solution to the problem. This solution was put into the place at around 9am Monday 7th April.
At around 10.30am Monday 7th April, it was discovered that the solution had inadvertantly corrupted one of the live wallet files on the server. The mining was therefore taken offline, as was the wallets for repair.
A recent wallet backup was retrieved and decrypted from secure storage, and a new solution was implemented, after first testing to ensure that the previous issues would not occur again.
This solution was put live at around 1.30pm (BST), and is running fine since.
As the pool operator and maintainer, I feel that I have let our miners, and infact Vertcoin down due to these issues, and must now begin the long road to regaining our lost miners.
As ever, if there are any issues relating to the above, or otherwise - do not hesitate to contact me, either here, or via the website's contact form, and we will be more than happy to assist.
Thank you for your time.
