Two updates:

1. The pushpool server (the one active right now) found it's first block. 100k shares overdue, but hey at least it found something. Payouts should be good at 520 confirms, make sure you grab your PPCoin.

2. Test stratum pool will be developed at http://198.199.74.113/, you can watch it's live development there. The backend for the pool works at http://198.199.74.113:3333, but worker management is not implemented yet. I'm thinking maybe a PPS pool with a high enough fee to cover volatility.

Update - I have Seven's PPC fork with stratum support working in the backend. I can currently connect to it and mine.

I'll slowly work on a frontend and switch us over to the new pool.

Make sure you are using VuxilsPool.com and not vPool.me, I disabled cookie sessions for vPool.me. Let me know if you still have issues

pushpool is a piece of poo poo, so I will be switching the fork over to the stratum code based off of Seven's work pretty soon here

Payment only happens when a block is found and confirmed, and there hasn't been one found yet. In fact, I think Coinotron is the only one consistently finding blocks at the moment because they have the hashing power. vPool hasn't found one in a few days, and D7 got lucky and found one shortly after they brought up their server, but has lacked since.

PPC's mining difficulty needs to be re-adjusted and it's happening gradually. We should find a block here in the next couple of days, and then payments will occur based on the proportions of shares you submitted to find the last block. 

We have over 160k shares submitted thus far and no block. Difficulty is at 230,000 right now, which means it takes about 230,000 shares on average to find a new block. So, we should see a block at around 230,000 (it could take a bit more, theoretically it could take a lot more days, but I'm hoping that's not the case =P )

I was doing this for a while but just have cronjobs to boot the services at start. I know have a cronjob restarting ppcoind every 2 hours =\

Every crash, pushpool is running but ppcoind isn't, so I'm not sure what's up

Not sure what's up, PPCoind stays healthy all day and then manages to crash 15 minutes after I go to bed and fails to restart. Sorry guys, I'm working everything out

PPC didn't change much as BTC crashed

We've had a few seldom crashes overnight, and I apologize for that. Reading through the main PPCoin thread, it seems that ppcoind has a memory leak that causes it to crash. This is in conjunction  with what I found - pushpool and mmcFE are always still running whenever a crash happens, but ppcoind is mysteriously killed. I am setting up a cron job to automatically restart ppcoind every few hours. Thanks everyone for your patience

We've had a few seldom crashes overnight, and I apologize for that. Reading through the main PPCoin thread, it seems that ppcoind has a memory leak that causes it to crash. This is in conjunction  with what I found - pushpool and mmcFE are always still running whenever a crash happens, but ppcoind is mysteriously killed. I am setting up a cron job to automatically restart ppcoind every few hours. Thanks everyone for your patience

The increased difficulty really sucks 

Ok, server has been completely stable for half of the day now, and we are well on our way to our first block. Thanks everyone for helping me test!

Have two wallets, treat one as a savings account, treat the other as a checking, live life normally 

Tbh ASICs will hit economies of scale and then everyone will have one. It's just short-term scarcity driving up the price. Plus, it's naive to think people won't make machines optimized to mine scrypt when there's enough incentive to do so

If anything, I think the bitcoin "crash" (imo it is still doing very successfully) shows that the cryptocurrency community should pick a few different coins and embrace them as mainstream. My picks are LTC and PPC, as LTC seems to already be quite established and PPC is a very interesting spin on BTC and offers some potential advantages that can really be very beneficial in the future.

vpoolserver,

Just a few notes - I think most of your bugs are coming from mmcFE. Connecting to your servers with miners works, but it sucks for us in the USA because of latency and we lag out - that's not something  that can be helped though, and it appears you have ppcoind and pushpool set up correctly.

mmcFE took me a few days of playing around with to get it right and I am still not very happy with it. The biggest bug I dealt with (which you may want to check) is how you are computing difficulty. When you use the getdifficulty api with  ppcoind, it does not differentiate between stake block difficulty and proof of work difficulty. For example, difficulty can be 300,000 from proof of work, then drop down to 9,000 for a few consecutive pos blocks, then back up to 300,000 for another pow block. When you use getdifficulty API, you get an array instead of a double (like you would with other coins) - this array contains both the latest pow and pos values from what I remember. You have to explicitely call the 'proof-of-work' element from the getdifficulty array.

Anyway we will probably both run into future bugs because mmcFE was not built for ppcoin, and ppcoin has many different things than BTC. After working on this myself, I understand that your mining pool was probably misconfigured\had bugs rather than you were trying to explicitely scam people. Let me know if you want to work on ironing bugs out together, we have essentially the same code now. Also, I switched my domain from vPool.me to VuxilsPool.com, so we can avoid confusion on that part.

Best,
Vuxil

Ok I brought the server back offline for about 2 hours so I could implement some new startup scripts and logging features. The cookies issue remains, so be sure you are using VuxilsPool.com now instead of vPool.me. You can still mine using vPool.me, but the website will not log you in using that URL due to how mmcFE handles sessions.

Anyway, you should all be able to connect again and mine away! Thanks!

Monit looks pretty interesting, ty for the tip. I hadn't heard of it previously, but I'll look into it now

I pulled it down to write some new start up scripts. All pool related software now run as services that should boot with the server, so they are not dependent on me starting them up through SSH. This should help with stability a bit, as all the downtime seemed to be directly related to my SSH sessions

I tracked down the bugs causing miners to disconnect. Apparently when I kill my SSH session to my server, it kills all programs running that I started during the session. I just have to make ppcoind and pushpool start up as system services - when I get home tonight I will do so.

For now, I will leave my ssh window open - if you suddenly disconnect it means my SSH session timed out. This will be fixed permanently tonight