Yeah, I know.  I've never been particularly troubled by the pool variance.  Really have just shrugged off the pool's long downturns and try not to get *too* excited when we find 2+ blocks per day.

My concerns are over share finding.  I'm finding that far more difficult to diagnose.  Not sure if my poor profitability over the past 20 days is just variance related or something more nefarious.  I think I'll stick around P2Pool solely for the challenge of figuring things out.  

Sadly my sole Antminer S1 does not generate shares fast enough to satisfy my data driven nature.  In the past week I've had an orphan rate of 14%, yet the previous week I had an orphan rate of 3.5%.  Unfortunately, by the time I get a statistically significant data set to work with the S1 will be relegated to the scrapheap.

The simple, and somewhat tempting, solution is to buy 9 more of them.  

It makes me sad to say this, but I've got to end my experiment with P2Pool.

I'm without question a hobbyist miner running a single antminer S1, and I was thrilled with the concept of P2Pool.

I've been running the node continuously for 20 days now, with a handful of 6-8 hours periods when I rolled over to backup nodes with much worse latecies, and just ran the numbers and have grossed .00624 BTC per day running a solid 200+ GH/s.

I guess I'm just a victim of bad luck/variance.

Was certainly willing to *risk* sacrificing some profitability to contribute towards decentralization, (and to keep myself busy/entertained configuring and optimizing my node) but getting HALF of my expected BTC for 3 weeks has pushed me to the point where I won't come close to breaking even on hardware barring a substantial spike in BTC prices (or a decline in difficulty, lol)

I still love the concept and will be keeping a close eye on things and will probably rejoin if I obtain more hashing power (something I'm seriously considering) or if some refinements are implemented to reduce variance for small miners (something I know forrestv has mentioned as a project/goal).

Wish you all lots of luck, and wanted to give particular thanks to mdude77 and jonnybravo0311 without whose posts I NEVER would have gotten a node going, much less running optimally.

I'm a relative P2Pool noob myself running an S1 and was able to get it going without too much difficulty.  Had a couple of minor IP addressing issues myself, but fully operator error.  I'm about 10 days ahead of you on this so will offer my "noob" experience.   

You say you were mining for awhile with U1s...were those mining to the same local p2pool node at 192.168.1.20?

You mention dhcp...I'm assuming the machine you're running your node on is configured to use 192.168.1.20 as a static address rather than getting dhcp leases?  That was one of my early problems...I'd assumed my machine was using a static (as I try to avoid DHCP as a rule on LANs) and I tried a bunch of other things before it occured to me that dynamic ip addressing was the issue.

Since you can ping 192.168.1.20 but the ant doesn't see the pool its a possibility that you're pinging a different machine thats not running the p2pool and your bitcoind (or qt).

Lastly, your bitcoind is running and fully synced?

In addition to a screenshot of your S! config screen a shot of your P2Pool window would be helpful as well

good luck