Re: Alert: chain fork caused by pre-0.8 clients dealing badly with large blocks
It was fascinating to watch the higher block chain continue to build. Was it ignorance by some large miners? Or was it an intentional attempt to keep the blockchain forked.
No, it was night. I woke up at 3am thanks to one guy who called me over skype. I have a lot of monitoring scripts which trigger SMS alert when something bad happen on pool, but there was almost no chance to catch this, because the bug wasn't in bitcoind 0.8 used by the pool, but in previous (and still widely spread) bitcoind 0.7.
I guess I assumed there would be some sort of "friend net" by which the major mining pools operators would hear of trouble demanding their attention. Such is the nature of a distributed, volunteer project, eh.My mining client is configured to print the message that goes to the server when it finds a share. From the hexadecimal code in the message, I could see the block header's Previous Block field, and I could see my pool was mining the wrong fork. The next pool I switched to was also mining the wrong fork. The third pool I tried was mining the correct (now current) fork.