I've power enough in my shop to run a few miners. No direct Internet connection but there is a wifi hotspot my laptop/netbook can access. What I'm stuck on it how to add a switch or router to connect a couple miners.
One important point to check is the network times.
Wifi, Hot-spots, VPNs, Tor and other public connections, can sometimes have severe network issues affecting a miner.
A miner's most important requirement is to get each share it finds to the node as quickly as possible.
Each miner also finds about 18 SPM (shares per minute) i.e. average one every 3.333 seconds, so the network needs to be consistently reliable.
Now I wont say that 100ms is too slow, since really that's not the end of the earth, but if it is over 200ms then you are going to have high stales, and if you ever find a block, that will of course also delay getting that block to the pool, then out to the rest of the world, and risk getting a stale or orphan.
Regular stale blocks and orphans are a clear sign that miners have network problems, or are a long way from the pool connections
(or there's a problem with the mining software in the miners that found the orphans)
... and each stale block/orphan is currently about $80k total lost by all miners.
We have a lot of nodes around the world - 8 public ones that everyone can mine to in 6 locations - 6 private whitelisted ones that some large miners use - and 2, not for mining, in china that are there to help with block distribution into china.
The Fibre relay is the main reason bitcoin has fewer orphans - but any pool ONLY relying on it to solve block distribution clearly hasn't seen the times when parts of the Fibre relay have been down for hours or days.
The pool connects to all the Fibre relays, so I do know on the rare occasions when parts of it are down.
I guess the point of it all being, make sure your network is good enough to mine on this pool so we don't lose blocks.
Don't assume a crappy or slow network is ever OK.
Edit: and don't use Tor