Which pools were you connected to?
Sniffing details about packets.... I am not sure if this is possible, as the ethernet switch would prevent sniffing a traffic meant for a different port.
But you know... One could sniff the traffic also on Internet exchanges or redirect the traffic on BGP level - just to catch the traffic.
One cannot reasonably expect that Internet traffic would be hidden - as it is not.
WafflePool West - I removed all other pools from the config. I do not believe this is a at all related to a rogue pool.
Switches, by very nature of the equipment, cannot isolate traffic to a specific port without the use of VLANs. Routing requests based on IP data (Transport layer - layer 4 in the OSI model) requires a "ROUTER" - switches function only on the data link layer (layer 2), aka MAC addresses. Suffice to say, a switch does not generally know what port a packet is intended for.
I know from personal experience that you used to be able to sniff traffic at OVH in their France datacenter. I doubt this has changed.
It could be someone with access to some significant backbone routers - but I highly doubt that.
And if you don't mind saying where are you mining Vertcoin ?
I went solo (found 1 block) and some p2pool.
Yeh I was just reading it can't be mined alongside normal script coins on a pool, And there's not enough of them for a multicoin pool yet, At least I don't think.
Kinda. Scrypt-Adaptive-N is fully backwards compatible with Scrypt. "Scrypt" PoW is simply with N=10. It wouldn't be difficult to automatically switch between scrypt and scrypt-n coins, although different intensity values would likely be desirable. The main things that needs to be done, is to have stratum pass the value of N along with work - this will ultimately be necessary for ease of use with adaptive-n coins anyway, as the value of N is of course adaptive (changes - in the case of vertcoin, increasing periodically over time).
The latest version of SGMiner already supports Nscrypt by simply specifying --nfactor in your config.