Bible Pay

Support => Mining => Topic started by: DeckardLain on April 13, 2022, 01:14:27 PM

Title: New Biblepay Mining Pool by Hanalani Schools
Post by: DeckardLain on April 13, 2022, 01:14:27 PM
Launched in March 2022, Hanalani Schools (http://www.hanalani.org) is now hosting a Biblepay RandomX mining pool.  Located in Hawaii, the pool is based on the same code as Foundation pool, with a number of changes/improvements (listed below).  Like Foundation pool, BBP is merge mined with XMR, via upstream pool supportxmr.com.

Get started here: https://bbp.hanalani.org/GettingStarted



Status: OK


The modified pool code is publicly available here: https://github.com/DeckardLain/foundation/tree/ShareLogLeaderboardRevamp

List of Changes

If you have any questions or need help with anything, feel free to post here, DM, or email (my address is on the pool's About page).  Status and updates on the pool will be posted here.

Thanks!
-Scott
Title: Re: New Biblepay Mining Pool by Hanalani Schools
Post by: DeckardLain on April 15, 2022, 12:13:14 AM
Pool About page updated today with some new info/stats:
If you want more reading material regarding luck calculation: https://braiins.com/blog/bitcoin-mining-pools-luck-shares-estimated-hashrate
Title: Re: New Biblepay Mining Pool by Hanalani Schools
Post by: DeckardLain on April 19, 2022, 06:59:19 PM
Pool site updated today with a fixed and simplified mining calculator - BBP earnings estimate only based on hashrate, difficulty, and block reward.  When using it, keep in mind that difficulty retargets at every block, and I've seen big swings at times (from <1.0 to 4.0+).
Title: Re: New Biblepay Mining Pool by Hanalani Schools
Post by: DeckardLain on April 27, 2022, 03:47:35 PM
Just a heads-up, if your miner can't connect to the pool, check your config/command line, the password setting (which should be your BBP address) in particular.  I see one miner attempting to connect with what appears to be XMRig's default password of "x".  If you need help, feel free to send me a message on this forum.
Title: Re: New Biblepay Mining Pool by Hanalani Schools
Post by: DeckardLain on May 02, 2022, 07:16:01 PM
My apologies for the numerous server restarts in the past week.  Downtime doesn't last more than a minute, but every time the server restarts, the payout cycle gets reset.  If you notice a missed payout, you can check the pool about page (https://bbp.hanalani.org/PoolAbout) for the last server restart time and when the next payout is scheduled.  Note that no rewards are lost in these events and are carried over to the next payout.

The restarts were because I was deploying fixes for some rather urgent issues that I had identified, most of which won't even be noticed by miners:

Everything's working smoothly now, so there should be less frequent restarts.  The pool wallet will need to be restarted occasionally (maybe once a month) because of increasing RAM usage.

This summer, we'll be upgrading some equipment in our data center, which will result in longer downtime, so I'll post here when I know the schedule.
Title: Re: New Biblepay Mining Pool by Hanalani Schools
Post by: DeckardLain on May 12, 2022, 08:39:32 PM
In case you noticed a few of the pools mined blocks not showing up in the Mining Status Recent Blocks Mined, I hopefully have a fix for it to deploy at the next server restart.  The important thing is that the issue has never affected reward/payout calculations--you can confirm this by checking the block rewards list in your miner info (https://bbp.hanalani.org/BlockHistory) report.  If you do notice any errors in the reward calculations, please let me know.

Thank you for your continued support!
Title: Re: New Biblepay Mining Pool by Hanalani Schools
Post by: DeckardLain on May 23, 2022, 08:54:24 PM
Pool server is down for a bit--the pool wallet crashed, so it will take some time to restart it.
Title: Re: New Biblepay Mining Pool by Hanalani Schools
Post by: DeckardLain on June 01, 2022, 03:13:15 PM
Pool server going down for a short time (hopefully less than an hour) for a datacenter firewall upgrade.
Title: Re: New Biblepay Mining Pool by Hanalani Schools
Post by: DeckardLain on August 02, 2022, 08:21:54 PM
As posted by Rob in the main thread (https://forum.biblepay.org/index.php?topic=517.msg12265#msg12265), minexmr.com is being shut down soon.  Hanalani BBP pool will also be switching to supportxmr.com for the XMR portion.  This switch will take place during a short server maintenance scheduled for Monday, August 8 at 19:00 UTC.  No miner configuration changes required.

Feel free to contact me if you have any questions.  As always, thank you for mining with Hanalani Schools!

-Scott
Title: Re: New Biblepay Mining Pool by Hanalani Schools
Post by: DeckardLain on September 29, 2022, 03:15:05 PM
Just want to update everyone on some pool updates that were mostly prompted by things I noticed after switching our XMR pool to supportxmr.com.

Error: Unauthenticated
If you've occasionally seen an "Unauthenticated" error in your miner, that's coming from supportxmr, and based on my observation, it appears that the XMR pool is forgetting about your miner, possibly because it hasn't submitted a share in a while.  The problem is, when supportxmr forgets your miner, they still send new jobs and keep the connection open, so you keep mining away, wasting hash power because the next share you find doesn't get credited by either the XMR or BBP pool.  The BBP pool still checks to see if solves a BBP block, but the shares won't get credited because we rely on share validation from the XMR pool.

To mitigate this, our pool now has a share timeout of around 7 minutes, so if it's been 7 minutes since we got a share from your miner, we'll disconnect it.  XMRig should reconnect within seconds and resume mining.  This seems to have eliminated 95%+ of the Unauthenticated errors.  Supportxmr creates jobs with difficulty targeted to 1 share per minute, so this should happen only in periods of bad share luck, sudden decreases in hashrate, or slow miners that get less than 1 share per minute at the minimum diff of 50,000 (<800H/s).

Pool Error Messages
Speaking of error messages, our pool now sends error messages back to miners for things like invalid configurations and timeouts like the one mentioned above.  Previously, the pool would just disconnect the miner, and you wouldn't know why.

IP Address currently banned
If you've seen the error message "IP Address currently banned for using an invalid mining protocol, please check your miner" come up randomly, this error is also coming from supportxmr.  Your IP address is not banned; it's the pool's IP that's banned because all connections to supportxmr are coming from the BBP pool server.  That means that any one of our miners can cause the pool IP to be banned.

Thankfully, supportxmr has multiple servers, and each miner that connects to our pool creates a new connection to a randomly assigned supportxmr pool server.  When supportxmr bans our IP, it seems that it doesn't communicate the ban to their other servers (at least not right away), so they don't disconnect all of our miners.  Also, after you get disconnected, your miner will retry until it gets a connection to a supportxmr server that doesn't have us banned.

I believe the bans get cleared after around 10 minutes, so they don't last long.  Nevertheless, the disconnects and retries when this happens results in a noticeable reduction in mining efficiency.  In our supportxmr stats, I saw dips of ~25% at times.

I finally had a chance to do some logging to investigate further, and the bans seem to be occurring after several "Duplicate share" errors reported by supportxmr.  Because these bans from supportxmr affect all Hanalani pool miners, we now temporarily ban any IP that gets this duplicate share error from supportxmr.

If we have your IP currently banned, you'll see this error message: "IP address currently banned, please check your miner", which is slightly different from supportxmr's message.  Feel free to post, PM, or email me if you are banned, and we can work together to figure out what's happening and try to fix it.

I'll be monitoring the logs closely over the next weeks/months and making adjustments as necessary.

Thank you for your continued support!

-Scott