I had p2pool running xubuntu on a 2 year old mac mini but at the end of the day my connection was letting me down and I figured I'd host it somewhere with a good reputation rather than get in to ironing out the wrinkles in my setup at home. I have a great connection I don't want to use for this kind of thing and a crappy connection with a static IP which I don't mind using for incoming connections but it's not reliable enough to run a pool through and in terms of backup I was also including connection problems there and I don't really want to route things through my primary connection using dynamic dns even just as a backup.

It's up now though, at

pool.fabulouspanda.co.uk:9332
username a BTC address
password can be anything

with the extended p2pool frontend at the same address I'm going to make a few modifications to.

Right now my only problem is increasing latency between p2pool and bitcoind 8.0.1 but I'm not sure whether that's a hardware issue or a software one… luckily it doesn't seem to be affecting mining.

it was mentioned by luke-jr that setting up a sub pool of eligius was a 'beta' possibility but i've never seen how that would be setup so I went with p2pool in the end. A new pool really needs to be able to connect to some existing network if it's going to be usable!

Thanks for offering all that help! Sounds like you have a pretty awesome setup there. Luckily the only testing I need to do now is with the latency between bitcoind and p2pool and the resource usage of running litecoind alongside that which I can test with the old mac mini.