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At one point, I did bring up with Rob my concern about BBP mining currently being reliant on an XMR pool for issuing jobs, but his response was that solo miners would continue the chain even if the XMR pool(s) are down.  I currently don't have the time or technical expertise to start up our own XMR pool or figure out how to get the BBP pool to create BBP-only mining jobs, so all I can do now is keep our miners mining and wait for help.

I'm aware of changes that Rob was planning to make to mining, but I know very little detail and nothing about the timing, so I can't really speak to that.  As far as I'm aware, nothing has changed yet that would cause these current pool problems.

Sorry everyone, I'm not sure exactly what's happening, other than it looks like the pool is getting banned by the XMR pool.  I don't have time right now to do in-depth troubleshooting, and the last time I tried emailing them, I never got a response.  The only guess I have is that a (possibly malicious or unintentional) miner is doing something to cause this ban from SupportXMR (on both Foundation and Hanalani pool), because our (Hanalani's) miners have moved to an internal private pool, and it's working fine.

Sorry, I've been busy so haven't been checking the forum.  This was affecting all miners for some time and was caused by some legacy pool code that was hammering the upstream pool and causing them to disconnect us.  I fixed it back on April 13, so that problem should be no more.

[Error: Unauthenticated]

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

As posted by Rob in the main thread, 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

Pool server going down for a short time (hopefully less than an hour) for a datacenter firewall upgrade.

Pool server is down for a bit--the pool wallet crashed, so it will take some time to restart it.

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 report.  If you do notice any errors in the reward calculations, please let me know.

Thank you for your continued support!

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 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:

• Gradually increasing CPU usage that would have brought the server to its knees within a week
• Pool was paying for invalid blocks
• Some additional performance optimizations that appears to also have a side effect of fixing the occasional "Unknown" block finder

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.

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.

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+).

[Pool About page updated today with some new info/stats:]

Pool About page updated today with some new info/stats:

• Approximate time until the next payout.
• Equivalent XMR difficulty target for the block we're trying to mine next.
• Pool luck stats
  
  
  
  • Current Round Duration - time since the last block was found by the pool
  • Expected Block Time - based on pool's 1-hr hashrate and the next BBP block difficulty target
  • Current Round Luck - based on shares received in the current round, 100% means the pool has received the expected number of shares for a block, 50% means it already received twice as many shares as expected. (Note that this will almost never match up with the round duration and expected block time because the difficulty target changes at every block.)
  • 1-Day/30-Day Luck - average luck based on the shares it took to find the blocks.  The long-term average should tend toward 100%.

If you want more reading material regarding luck calculation: https://braiins.com/blog/bitcoin-mining-pools-luck-shares-estimated-hashrate

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

Launched in March 2022, Hanalani Schools 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

• 0.1% pool fee (to cover payout transaction fees).
• Change from Proportional to PPLNS (1-hour share window) reward system. (See pool hopping)
• Diff-weighted shares (Original pool code was awarding all shares equally--Rob has already applied his own implementation of this to Foundation pool.)
• Fixed hashrate calculation (for miners and pool total).
• Various database changes and performance improvements.
  
  
  
  • Redid some networking code to eliminate occasional 4-8 second share submission times, resulting in reduced stale (expired) shares on the XMR side (I've observed a drop of ~3.5% to <1.0% after the change). (Also implemented on Foundation pool.)
  • Check chain height every 3 seconds (vs. 60) to make sure we're working on the latest block
  • Return error messages (invalid configuration, timeouts, etc.) to miners instead of just disconnecting them.
• Changed Leaderboard to Mining Status, updated every minute (vs. 2 minutes) and at every block mined by the pool:
  
  
  
  • Last 10 blocks mined by the pool and who mined them
  • List of pool miners by BBP address with the following stats:
    
    
    
    • 1-hour average hashrate.
    • Total diff-1 shares in the PPLNS share log.
    • Approximate reward percentage of the next block found.
    • Last share timestamp.
• Miner Info - search by your BBP mining address
  
  
  
  • Approximate percent of next block subsidy to be awarded and estimated BBP based on last block subsidy.
  • Total pending BBP (awarded, but not yet paid).
  • Total BBP paid in the last 30 days.
  • List of block rewards awarded (up to last 100 blocks, updated every 20 minutes for blocks with at least 7 confirmations) with height, percent of block subsidy, BBP amount, and transaction ID, if already paid.
  • List of recent payouts (up to 30), with timestamp, amount, and transaction ID.
  • List of recent blocks found (up to 10) with height, worker name, and timestamp.
  • Block heights and transaction IDs can be clicked to open in Chainz.
• About Page
  
  
  
  • XMR fees are controlled by the upstream pool and subject to change, so the number will no longer be displayed here.
  • Next block target difficulty (and equivalent XMR difficulty) is included with height.
  • Total Blocks found is linked to the Chainz Extraction Statistics page for the pool mining address.
  • Approximate time until the next payout.
  • Pool luck stats
    
    
    
    • Current Round Duration - time since the last block was found by the pool
    • Expected Block Time - based on pool's 1-hr hashrate and the next BBP block difficulty target
    • Current Round Luck - based on shares received in the current round, 100% means the pool has received the expected number of shares for a block, 50% means it already received twice as many shares as expected. (Note that this will almost never match up with the round duration and expected block time because the difficulty target changes at every block.)
    • 1-Day/30-Day Luck - average luck based on the shares it took to find the blocks.  The long-term average should tend toward 100%.
• Getting Started
  
  
  
  • You must agree to the terms and conditions before the pool address/port and instructions are displayed.  You must agree to the terms and conditions before mining at the pool.
  • Pool XMR donation address is displayed on this page if you have no interest in the XMR rewards.
  • Sample Windows batch file is provided, with failover pools (Foundation and miningpool.fun) configured.
• Fixed and simplified mining calculator

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