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.
I also tested that frontend for the p2pool but it was eating my RAM if I left it open on the browser so I went back to the old and just did some modifications so it looked pretier hehe, as it doesnt do any kind of managment you dont really need something very pretty as longs as the stats are readable enough. One thing Im trying to setup is an option to search your own BTC address so you dont need to go throught the whole list.
For the server storage I know there is a hosting in France that for around 15 euros per month you will quite a good server with 1 tb of hard drive and 5 tb of traffic, then you can update it for more traffice, power, etc ....
About the latency between the p2pool and the bitcoind thats probably a hardware resources problem, bitcoind uses quite a lot of RAM (at least the one Im running in windows 24/7 uses around 500-700 mb) and some disk. I would recommend you to run a light version of Debian (my basic installation of debian only uses 60mb of RAM) to get the best of your hardware. Remenber that using litecoind and bitcoind will take a lot of resources by thenselves. If in the end you go for a normal pool you will also need to get in count the database cpu/RAM usage.
I also switched to p2pool as to get a stand-alone pool you need quite some gigahashes to actually get something. Even p2pool get only one or two or even none blocks per day with 1Ths.