I couldn't get solo mining to work either.
I now use
http://brutum-pool.com as the difficulty on steamoctane seams to high for me to get any shares. Brutum is not based on YiiMP, so it shouldn't be affected by the YiiMP exploit. For now i'm the only Miner there, so it is essentially solo-mining

Hello,
The exploit has been patched and the server locked down with new security. For our pool you can manually set your difficulty just add d=1 {or what ever difficulty you want} to your password. So it would be "c=VSX d=1".
Thank You!