Issue yesterday
Posted: Fri Oct 02, 2015 9:10 am
Yesterday, there was an issue that caused the server to reject shares for a period of time. The problem was caused by a "too many files open" error.
While we aren't able to determine the cause of the error, we did notice that immediately before the errors started there were 6640 instances of a misconfigured miner submitting a null password that were logged. Normally, a miner should submit an empty string if it wants to submit a blank password, and most mining software does that. The system should not have been affected by these passwords other than logging them, but just to be sure Chris added some code to treat null passwords as equivalent to an empty password. We restarted the mining server to apply the fix.
Perhaps the these password issues caused the server to run out of memory. If that is the case, then it won't happen again. My guess is that this is a freak occurrence. Unfortunately, however, we can't reproduce the problem. We'll be sure to pay attention to whether a server crash happens again and continue our investigation if it does.
Thanks for your patience. Please report anything abnormal as soon as you detect it.
While we aren't able to determine the cause of the error, we did notice that immediately before the errors started there were 6640 instances of a misconfigured miner submitting a null password that were logged. Normally, a miner should submit an empty string if it wants to submit a blank password, and most mining software does that. The system should not have been affected by these passwords other than logging them, but just to be sure Chris added some code to treat null passwords as equivalent to an empty password. We restarted the mining server to apply the fix.
Perhaps the these password issues caused the server to run out of memory. If that is the case, then it won't happen again. My guess is that this is a freak occurrence. Unfortunately, however, we can't reproduce the problem. We'll be sure to pay attention to whether a server crash happens again and continue our investigation if it does.
Thanks for your patience. Please report anything abnormal as soon as you detect it.