Strange!
I worked on a recent patch for Bitcoin that added ping time measurement (using ping/pong). During development, I ran into some strange nodes out there that were doing something similar.
https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/2937#issuecomment-23457819Here's the referenced IRC chat:
http://bitcoinstats.com/irc/bitcoin-dev/logs/2013/08/28#l1377673880Many of these IP addresses match!!
Only thing is, this was for the *pong* message, not ping. They were sending me pong messages of zero size. I now check the size before doing any processing, and just throw it out if it's too small, to avoid the spam messages you get about the exception. I don't remember ever getting any undersized *ping* messages from them.
I remember the version also, it was 0.8.99. I think this just means you're running the latest Bitcoin from GitHub, compiled yourself, and thus not an official release? Not sure about that, though.
Didn't think this had anything to do with p2pool, though. Interesting.
Josh
p2pool only connects to a local node and pretends to be another client to getblocks. None of these bad peers are p2pool itself.
Hmm, with your commit 0.9 users will have no visible way of seeing these protocol breaking bad nodes. Perhaps a -debug mode only warning would be helpful?