Status as of Sunday, February 11, 2018

[Steve Sokolowski]

Good morning!

• We've got a few new and interesting fixes coming out today. The first issue is one that I've been trying to figure out for a while - how to provide more information about why miners are unable to connect to the system. Once released this afternoon, authorization failures will return a human-readable error message that will make it easier to troubleshoot issues, and which should hopefully result in fewer support tickets. For example, one of the messages is "Authorization failed because the static coin is not enabled for mining."
• There will also be a small change to the way static coins are handled. Previously, when an invalid coin name was entered, the miner would automatically be assigned to mine dynamically, sometimes resulting in confusion. Now, the miner will be rejected with an error message. This change may disconnect some misconfigured miners upon deployment.
• There is a problem with the statistics displayed for the total number of workers in the pool. We aren't able to determine the cause, but we believe that the issue is a display error only, and does not affect mining itself. We'll continue to investigate the problem and will include a fix in today's release if we are able.
• I've made progress on equihash mining, after two weeks of work, but I still think it's going to take another 14 days to get it ready for release.
• At the same time, SHA-256 mining is ready but waiting for Chris to install the coins. He hasn't been able to do that because of the number of support tickets that are outstanding. These tickets are largely caused by bugs that we don't have the manpower to fix at the moment. We are hopeful that we will get an acceptance of our offer tomorrow for another developer so that the issues can be fixed, and therefore Chris can have more time to move forward. That said, if you know of anyone who is interested in working on the trader, who has a college degree in computer science or a related field, and is available for full-time work, feel free to contact us in case our outstanding offer is declined tomorrow.
• Constance has finally gotten to the "polling" feature, where customers will be able to vote on features and new coins. While polls will be available this week, the addition of new coins will probably have to wait until no earlier than May, the date by which our current offer would be trained.
• There have been some changes to the rules in the forums in the general discussion area, to keep things more on-topic. Please review the forum rules, which are displayed in orange text above the topics, before posting.

[travelinmusic]

Just some observations on statistics for number of miners. no reply necessary. ... After the site went offline and miners were kicked to backup pool, When PH came back my miners try to connect and are only gradually admitted over several hours. The error UNDEFINED (4) appears and flashes on and off for maybe 1/2 hour or more until it is finally accepted. In that time each undefined is still hashing at backup pool although not efficiently. Once the miners are back at PH in a normal mode, it will attempt to add a few more until all are settled.
So in conclusion it seems that the erratic miner stats are going up and down fast counting and then rejecting the undefined (2) Assuming that this is happening to 1000's of miners at other farms.
It is like trying to fit thousands of pingpong balls back into a bag fast. some keep escaping until finally all are contained.
It seems like the code is doing the right thing as designed but the bag opening is limited by slim cable via Comcast.
It could be related to the new A4+ units if this is a relatively new occurrence. (pardon my pre morning coffee jargon)