What happened?
On October 12th at approximately 1000 UTC the stratum server received a massive spike in traffic that lasted 2 hours until about 1200 UTC. During this time, a pool power user was (presumably accidentally) flooding the stratum server with failed authentication attempts. They appear to have switched a cluster onto the pool without first registering the worker usernames. The flood of authentication attempts reading the database caused enough errors to disconnect the database from the stratum server and front end. After flushing hosts, authenticating the workers properly, and restarting the system there appear to be no further errors.
Q&A
When I was out, I received several questions on the support page that I was not able to get to. I try to answer most of them here.
I heard someone ask and another confirmed but I’d rather hear from an administrator. Can you use the same worker name for multiple cpu’s?
Yes, there are several users on this and other pools that have the same username for several workers without issue. I also have a script that lets me batch input workers for power users that already have setups with several hundred usernames they don’t want to enter manually.
How many nodes can we connect using port 3335?
This is a fixed high difficulty port. You can connect as many workers as the pool can handle. If you have an overwhelming number of small workers, I’d recommend this port to reduce network and server load.
I’m not 100% sure why, but if I had to guess it would be because there are orders of magnitude more workers on this port than on 3333. I am hoping to add more fixed diff ports soon.
Hi, I don’t have create account.
Unfortunately not all email providers accept emails from the pool. There’s a small list of known good email providers here: Knowledgebase – Email.
What if I accidentally put in a VRC address for my payout on my account instead of a VRM address? I am not sure if anything has tried to send to the VRC address yet but I changed it to my VRM wallet address.
The node shouldn’t validate sending VRM to a VRC address and the transaction would fail. If the VRC address happens by some miracle to validate as a VRM address, the coins might go poof, but that’s exceedingly unlikely. If you changed it back to a VRM address you’re good to go.
Why can’t I register and token expired?
The authentication token MPOS gives you to make changes, register, stay logged in, etc, times out on a very short timer as a security measure. Simply put, you need to make changes quickly after receiving the authentication email. If you’re having trouble receiving the email, let me know the name of your provider and I’ll check it out. Again, there’s a list of known good and bad providers here: Knowledgebase – Email.
I have 5 workers but the system only shows 1, sometimes 3, sometimes 2. The share information shows 0. How do I know if the pool is counting my shares in the right way.
This morning there was an issue with the MySQL connection that caused share information to show up as 0. However, in general, MPOS is not super great at displaying small numbers accurately. If the miners themselves are saying they’re submitting shares then they are working, it’s just that they might not be submitting often enough for MPOS to count them as ‘active.’
The share count displayed on the front end is also multiplied by difficulty. 100 submitted shares at 0.001 difficulty will be calculated as 0.1 shares and your payout will accurately reflect this 0.1 share even though the frontend rounds down the displayed number to 0.
Why are my shares not being counted. My mining software shows over 1000 shares in the last 5 rounds and the web site has shown 3. I understand there may be a delay for reporting some shares, but I was in one round for an hour and only got credit for 1 share.
Again, the share count displayed on the front end is calculated from submitted shares * difficulty. Submitting 1000 shares at 0.003 difficulty will appear as exactly 3 shares on the front end. Otherwise everybody would appear at roughly the same share count (vardiff adjusts each individual miner to submit shares at approximately the same rate) despite some workers doing considerably more work. By multiplying shares submitted with share difficulty the payouts represent the amount of work each worker actually does.
Can you activate my account?
Some email providers do not receive emails from the pool. I’ve noticed this happens mostly when the receiving end is running Exim or does not accept encrypted emails. I can activate your account manually and set your auto payout threshold for you, but you won’t be able to make manual payments or change other settings on your account.