p2pool - Decentralized, Absolutely DoS-Proof, Pool Hopping-Proof Pool [archival]

[forrestv]

What is the recommended way to run p2pool as a service on Windows? I have bitcoind running as a service using BitcoinServiceWrapper (somewhere in the forums), and I would like to do the same with p2pool.

Also, how many peers is the maximum? I obtained 10 peers rapidly, but then it never went any higher than that. Additionally, there is (xxxxx/17381 Verified), which is increasing extremely slowly. What does this number mean?

P2Pool only tries to make 10 outgoing connections, so if your port 9333 is not open, that is where it will stay. P2Pool tries to get 2 days of shares (~17280 shares), so that many is normal. It's just the number of shares back that your node knows about.

A post sometimes in August mentions a -chart option ... it seems
to have disappeared ?

It was --charts, but now it automatically detects if the dependencies are present and enables it if they are. However, the current release doesn't include very good charts. There's work in progress on better charts and it's visible at http://forre.st:9332/graphs/ .

I'd like to run one instance of p2pool and the bitcoin client on a small
non-mining machine and have all my miners get work from there.

Is that possible ?
If so, how can I see per-miner stats in the pool's output ?

Definitely possible. P2Pool by default listens on all interfaces, so you can just point them to the host running P2Pool. P2Pool does not collect per-miner stats yet, though it's a priority and going to happen as part of the new graphs.

[1714000064]

1714000064

[ThiagoCMC]

Guys!

 I need some help here...

 I like to setup P2Pool at my Mining Rig with: Bitcoin / Namecoin via merged mining and Litecoin.

 I'm using Ubuntu 11.04 64 bits.

 I already have the 3 daemons running, the bitcoind (from Ubuntu PPA), namecoind and litecoind compiled from sources.

 Now I want to setup the P2Pool daemon to talk with Bitcoin (default), with Namecoin via merged mining feature and, with Litecoin.

 So, how to do it?!

 Do I need two P2Pool daemons? One for Bitcoin/Namecoin and another for exclusively Litecoin?!

 Any tips?!

 I would like to keep this as simple as possible (with KISS Principle in mind)...

 The P2Pool dependencies are already installed.

Cheers!
Thiago

[rjk]

What is the recommended way to run p2pool as a service on Windows? I have bitcoind running as a service using BitcoinServiceWrapper (somewhere in the forums), and I would like to do the same with p2pool.

Also, how many peers is the maximum? I obtained 10 peers rapidly, but then it never went any higher than that. Additionally, there is (xxxxx/17381 Verified), which is increasing extremely slowly. What does this number mean?

P2Pool only tries to make 10 outgoing connections, so if your port 9333 is not open, that is where it will stay. P2Pool tries to get 2 days of shares (~17280 shares), so that many is normal. It's just the number of shares back that your node knows about.

I did open the port for it, that is why I was wondering. I already have a static IP and use the same machine for a few other things including a web and mail server.

Also, can p2pool talk to a remote bitcoind, or must they both be on the same box? I haven't found any sort of --connect option, but perhaps I'm doing it wrong. (also, any word on running it as a service?)

[ovidiusoft]

Also, can p2pool talk to a remote bitcoind, or must they both be on the same box? I haven't found any sort of --connect option, but perhaps I'm doing it wrong. (also, any word on running it as a service?)

It can, use options --bitcoind-address, --bitcoind-rpc-port, --bitcoind-p2p-port.

[rjk]

Also, can p2pool talk to a remote bitcoind, or must they both be on the same box? I haven't found any sort of --connect option, but perhaps I'm doing it wrong. (also, any word on running it as a service?)

It can, use options --bitcoind-address, --bitcoind-rpc-port, --bitcoind-p2p-port.

Oh good, thank you.

[ovidiusoft]

Do I need two P2Pool daemons? One for Bitcoin/Namecoin and another for exclusively Litecoin?!

Correct. You'll need to install the ltc_scrypt module from the litecoin_scrypt directory and then you can run p2pool for Litecoin. The other p2pool daemon will do BTC+NMC merged mining, but keep in mind that for namecoin you are actually solo mining. See options --merged-url and --merged-userpass, which need to point to namecoind rpc. Hopefully a future version of p2pool will do real p2p merged mining.

[forrestv]

I already have the 3 daemons running, the bitcoind (from Ubuntu PPA), namecoind and litecoind compiled from sources.

 Now I want to setup the P2Pool daemon to talk with Bitcoin (default), with Namecoin via merged mining feature and, with Litecoin.

 So, how to do it?!

 Do I need two P2Pool daemons? One for Bitcoin/Namecoin and another for exclusively Litecoin?!

I'd recommend sticking this in litecoin.conf:

Code:

rpcport=11332
port=11333

Otherwise, the bitcoin-P2Pool and litecoind's ports will conflict.

By default, namecoind's RPC port conflicts with Bitcoin's too, but you probably already fixed that.

You need to run two instances of P2Pool, one for Bitcoin and Namecoin, and one for Litecoin.

For the Bitcoin-Namecoin one: python run_p2pool.py BITCOIN_PASS --merged-url http://127.0.0.1:NAMECOIN_RPC_PORT/ --merged-userpass NAMECOIN_USER:NAMECOIN_PASS
For the Litecoin one: python run_p2pool.py LITECOIN_PASS --net litecoin --bitcoind-rpc-port 11332 --bitcoind-p2p-port 11333

[shad]

i am following this since first release, i had it running for testing
this thing is the future!!!
but i see some troubles

1) the problem with merged mining: i looked a little bit over the code, an afaik you are only checking your own hashes against namecoin or whatevercoin and you get the hole block, so alternative-blockchains are solo mining.

my evil side says me that all good bitcoin hashes are stored in this history-db to do double checking (verification of the share-history so there are no "cheaters") and if i understand the merged mining stuff right ever good bitcoin-share could also be a good namecoin-share, so all i have to do is set up a little "optimized" P2P-Pool-server with or without a miner and send every new share that is coming over P2P to my alternative "solo-mining-namecoin-server" and hope that there is a positive match!
or did i miss something? i guess i am not the only one with this idea....

my suggestion is that there should be at least an namecoin support by sending the share with bitcoin&namecoin-adresse, so that also the namecoins are splitted over the users that provide a valid namecoin adresse and if an share without valid namecoinadress comes over P2P there should be a check by the merged-miners
i know there are more alternative chains but namecoin is by hashrate the second one! and namecoins are a good idea, my opinion is that other currencies are only splitting the community

2)version stuff: at some releases you are writting that everbody has to update the version, what would happen if i am not able to update because of some remotecontrol-problems? is there some kind of protocol version? i didn't look that up in your code, i would prefer a split of the pools so that people who arent updating because of what ever are mining with the other non-updaters

3)small thing: it would be nice if there would be some proxy(tor) support, i know that when everbody would use this over tor there would be a major connection problem, but not more as if nobody would make a port-redirect on there routers

don't get this wrong, i really like your project, i looked at the code and this is amazing for a one man show  

[forrestv]

1) the problem with merged mining: i looked a little bit over the code, an afaik you are only checking your own hashes against namecoin or whatevercoin and you get the hole block, so alternative-blockchains are solo mining.

my evil side says me that all good bitcoin hashes are stored in this history-db to do double checking (verification of the share-history so there are no "cheaters") and if i understand the merged mining stuff right ever good bitcoin-share could also be a good namecoin-share, so all i have to do is set up a little "optimized" P2P-Pool-server with or without a miner and send every new share that is coming over P2P to my alternative "solo-mining-namecoin-server" and hope that there is a positive match!
or did i miss something? i guess i am not the only one with this idea....

my suggestion is that there should be at least an namecoin support by sending the share with bitcoin&namecoin-adresse, so that also the namecoins are splitted over the users that provide a valid namecoin adresse and if an share without valid namecoinadress comes over P2P there should be a check by the merged-miners
i know there are more alternative chains but namecoin is by hashrate the second one! and namecoins are a good idea, my opinion is that other currencies are only splitting the community

You can't use somebody else's share as a Namecoin attempt that would pay you. The Namecoin blocks all include a transaction to the miner that created it, which you can't change. Changing it would change the block's hash, making it worthless. Also, you can't use a non-Namecoin share to get NMC, because Namecoin requires a special tag to be inside the block.

Yeah, I'm working towards pooled merged Namecoin mining.

2)version stuff: at some releases you are writting that everbody has to update the version, what would happen if i am not able to update because of some remotecontrol-problems? is there some kind of protocol version? i didn't look that up in your code, i would prefer a split of the pools so that people who arent updating because of what ever are mining with the other non-updaters

That will already happen - the sharechain will fork, with old miners on one side and new miners on the other.

Also, I try to schedule these forking changes at least a few weeks in the future, so everyone has a lot of time to upgrade. For example, the last change that went from a 12 hour to 24 hour payout period was included in a release 25 days before the actual change happened.

3)small thing: it would be nice if there would be some proxy(tor) support, i know that when everbody would use this over tor there would be a major connection problem, but not more as if nobody would make a port-redirect on there routers

Tor would probably increase latency quite a bit... But in any case, you can already do it with tsocks: tsocks python run_p2pool.py ... should work fine.

[shad]

thx for the info

is anyone running this with X6500? (https://github.com/fizzisist/x6500-miner)

[forrestv]

thx for the info

is anyone running this with X6500? (https://github.com/fizzisist/x6500-miner)

I know that coblee is (or at least was).

[coblee]

thx for the info

is anyone running this with X6500? (https://github.com/fizzisist/x6500-miner)

I know that coblee is (or at least was).

I've tried to but it doesn't work properly. I think X6500 doesn't work well with shares with difficulty >1.

[DeathAndTaxes]

thx for the info

is anyone running this with X6500? (https://github.com/fizzisist/x6500-miner)

I know that coblee is (or at least was).

I've tried to but it doesn't work properly. I think X6500 doesn't work well with shares with difficulty >1.

That would seem to be more a problem w/ the miner software than the X6500. 

[forrestv]

Something I don't understand ...

. I start the bitcoin daemon, wait till it's up and running
. I start the pool daemon with a payout address specified on the command line and whose private key is in the wallet of the bitcoin daemon
. They talk to one another fine
. I start cgminer, it gets shares from the pool fine and after a while, solves some
. The pool reports solved shares received from the miner

Everything looks peachy until I decide to  look at: http://127.0.0.1:9332/current_payouts

My payout address is nowhere to be seen

Am I missing something ?

Look at P2Pool's status line. Are the shares not orphaned or dead? If they're not, they should definitely be displayed in /current_payouts .

[forrestv]

Something I don't understand ...

. I start the bitcoin daemon, wait till it's up and running
. I start the pool daemon with a payout address specified on the command line and whose private key is in the wallet of the bitcoin daemon
. They talk to one another fine
. I start cgminer, it gets shares from the pool fine and after a while, solves some
. The pool reports solved shares received from the miner

Everything looks peachy until I decide to  look at: http://127.0.0.1:9332/current_payouts

My payout address is nowhere to be seen

Am I missing something ?

Look at P2Pool's status line. Are the shares not orphaned or dead? If they're not, they should definitely be displayed in /current_payouts .

Status line ?
Where do I get that ?
Do you mean the last line of the logs ?

This is what the logs say:

Code:

2012-01-10 23:10:39.152235 New work for worker! Share difficulty: 130.946215 Payout if block: 0.005189 BTC Total block value: 50.041000 BTC including 38 transactions
2012-01-10 23:10:41.490309 Pool: 64794MH/s in 17365 shares (17369/17369 verified) Recent: 0.00% >0H/s Shares: 0 (0 orphan, 0 dead) Peers: 10
2012-01-10 23:10:41.490381 Average time between blocks: 0.96 days
2012-01-10 23:10:41.490426 Pool stales: 12%

Digging in the logs, here's the latest accepted share:

Code:

2012-01-10 23:09:29.541931 Worker submitted share with hash > target:
2012-01-10 23:09:29.542019     Hash:   e509b74eb3ad7ce0cedb0a47495f586aafa73714965bffb1d94f890a
2012-01-10 23:09:29.543537     Target: 1fffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff

And cgminer reports 22 shares as accepted by the pool.


sad

You haven't gotten any shares yet - "Shares: 0 (0 orphan, 0 dead)". The "Worker submitted share with hash > target" would seem to indicate that you have an old version of cgminer... You should upgrade it.

[forrestv]

I compiled it from source about two days ago.
I guess that might qualify as old ... let me go recompile then.
(btw, I am mining on a CPU, in case this has a bearing).

Ah, nevermind, I guess the CPU miner doesn't check the target. That's fine then. You should get a real P2Pool share about every 17 shares that cgminer says it submitted.

[paraipan]

watching...

[forrestv]

Is this http://forre.st:9332/patron_sendmany?total=1.5 reporting correctly?

I was about to send another donation to the miners and in the process noticed there were far fewer addresses today compared to yesterday. I'll hold off for now.

This is intended. It now combines very small (<0.01 BTC) addresses using a proportional lottery (gmaxwell's work).

[forrestv]

Two things ... first, the code seems to actually be checking the
target before submitting back to the pool. I might have misread,
but every CPU implementation in cgminer actually calls fulltest
on a matching piece of work.

Second, I now have mined close to 40 shares that all triggered
a "worker submitted share with hash > target" ... this is increasingly
likely a bug somewhere.

Question : what made you say that older version of cgminer displayed
this behavior ? Did I miss something in the way the target is handled
by cgminer in the case of your pool ?

I am very sure that it doesn't... I am testing CPU mining with cgminer and looked at the code. The CPU mining code never calls fulltest. One of every 138 of your shares should qualify as a P2Pool share.

An older version of cgminer didn't check the target when GPU mining.

[Matoking]

The Bitcoin client (v0.5.1) tends to crash every now and then while I'm using p2pool.