I gave up on setting up a Paxum account as well.  In order to add a checking account, you need the bank's SWIFT-BIC code.  I understand that not all banks have a record with Swift and they often deal with intermediary banks when it comes to international transfers.  This would be fine, but the website will *NOT* let you set up an account with an intermediary this way because the primary account still requires a SWIFT-BIC code.  Seriously... the routing number+account number is not sufficient? 

FAIL.

Huge pain in the butt.  At least Dwolla was easy to set up.  Perhaps the simplest means of withdrawing from Tradehill without incurring huge fees is to simple have them cut you a check and send via U.S. Post. 

And having a razor sharp image of my driver's license rejected (taken with my Thunderbolt's 8MP camera in full daylight with no image cropping) is a joke.  The image was perfect enough that I could have laminated it to a plastic card and used it in place of the original and no one would be the wiser.

Glad that I could help.  Some people might use this to mine behind firewalls or, at their own peril, on business machines.  As Luke stated, port 80 works as well.  I still have the intermittent problems if I try port 80 so I'm sticking to my solution for the time being.

I really want to see this pool succeed.  I somewhat dislike proportional pools because they are quite easy for pool-hoppers to take advantage of.  I showed a few friends 'the light' this evening and they are moving their 2GH/s rigs over from btcguild for a few days to see how it pans out.  Hopefully they will stick around.  The more power, the better!

I am not saying that <10MH/s is not important.  What I am saying is that the pool admin will likely want to make a determination as to how to manage the pool resources.  

This is a free pool and the admins have to rely upon donations made in good will.  No one has unlimited bandwidth and, unfortunately, bandwidth costs money.  Also, unfortunately, it is more effective for a single client to connect to the pool and hash away at 400MH/sec than it is for 800 clients to connect and bang away at 0.5MH/sec.  


As of yet, I'm unaware of any zombie computers actually using GPU to mine; they all appear to be cpuminers.  I'm not saying that they can't, but that they usually do not.   For reference:


Perhaps 10MH/sec was too strict, but surely 1M/sec should be considered, with the option for an exception to be made for legitimate users after registration.  This, however, raises the question as to how to limit an account to a single worker since the botnet controller can simply request an exception posing as a legitimate user and the use that account for all the zombies.

DDoS is a pain, unfortunately.  I'm not trying to be a jerk so don't be hostile.  I'm trying to offer suggestions to help get our pool back up and running and prevent future problems.

Perhaps to deal with this in the future, you can go down this dark and shady road...

Put a notice on the site that only miners pulling in at least 10MH/sec are welcome. 

This will not keep out the cpumining botnet, but it will establish the terms of your pool and the botnet would be violating those terms.  Then, once you identify a future botnet, invalidate 2/3 of all shares submitted by miners running less than 10MH/sec and just pretend like they didn't happen.  Net result, the rest of us benefit from the work of the botnet and the impact to the botnet's profitability might be low enough that they don't even notice.

btw,

if anyone else is experiencing network wonkiness trying to connect to eligius, you might want to consider a proxy.  if you have servers at one site that are connecting reliably and another site that is failing to connect to mining.eligius.st even though ping works, you can try setting up an ssh tunnel to eligius through your working hosts.  this has helped a few individuals and I have no idea what is going on from a network perspective on the server end.

if you do not have a remote host that is working, and you are experiencing connectivity issues and you are sure that the pool is up (according to the website), you can try doing what I did...

Install Tor, get it running, say, on the default port 9050... then fire off socat like this in another terminal:
socat TCP4-LISTEN:8399,fork SOCKS4A:localhost:mining.eligius.st:8337,socksport=9050

once socat is up (there will not be output to the console), simply direct your miners to localhost:8399 and you should get in without problems.  I have been running like this for several hours now and have seen zero negative impact to hashrate or invalid counts.  This has completely eliminated my issue of idle miners.

could ya please whitelist me so that i can contribute in the pool forum...  i've made my pre-requisites (time & post count).

btw, you could probably lower the logged-in time to 1hr and still deter the same number of spammers.

If you are ultra paranoid, there are many non-bitcoin related guides out there on how to set up an encrypted filesystem.  At a minimum, you should be running linux to make yourself less of a target.  I'm not bashing on Windows, but personally I feel that it is easier to secure a linux box.

You should encrypt your home directory and use an encrypted swap as well.  I avoid encrypting my entire filesystem due to performance concerns.  swap may be a bit overkill, but you never know for sure how the client is going to work unless you look into the source. 

Ideally you would use an encrypted thumbdrive (4GB or larger for the database files) mounted to ~/.bitcoin or wherever your bitcoin client sets up its data, then shut down the client and remove the thumbdrive when not in use.  You can use a smaller drive and symlink just the wallet.dat file if you want.   I chose to keep the DB there so that I can use clients on different computers and just haul the thumbdrive around with minimal block-synching required.


Although I am a Gentoo user, I found this to be an excellent link detailing how to set up an encrypted thumbdrive on ubuntu: http://www.packtpub.com/article/securely-encrypt-removable-media-with-ubuntu
 
Perform the steps here to secure your wallet in Windows/Mac/Linux.  The linux instructions also cover encrypting your home directory and swap:
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Securing_your_wallet

I cannot stress enough how important it is to create a separate user for bitcoin and avoid browsing/emailing with this user.

Be safe, be smart... and most of all, be a pain in the ass to the hackers. 

They will never be able to effectively regulate or shutdown bitcoin due to its decentralized nature.

The real question is whether or not bitcoin will grow to the point that the government gives a damn about it.

I have switched over to eligius.st for the time being.  Spotty connectivity until I rammed my miners through Tor to make the connection, now it works fine.

Some people have issues and others do not.  Often times using a VPN connection to a a different provider resolves the problem.  Unfortunately my only other connection point would be through work, and I'm not about to use business resources for mining.

-zen

I'm not even sure how solo mining works.  Aren't you competing with all the pools for discovering the blocks?  If so, wouldn't your chance of success, even with a 5GH/sec setup be very very small?

BTW, this is the suspected botnet: http://eligius.st/~artefact2/3/14j7N9wPPy2P2UPixzTgWJmMsUSGJAfM1Z

This account was not active until a few hours after a botnet was purged from btcguild.  This guy sprung up from nowhere and is hashing at an almost identical rate.

I would notify the admin on this forum, but it appears that I am relegated to posting on the newb forum for a while.

-zen

Well, after the botnet was banned from btcguild, a DDoS was launched to take down that pool.  I moved to eligius pool, and now it appears as if the botnet has moved over there for mining at 22GH/s.   >.>