How do you make sure that your firewall isn't stopping the miner's connections?
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I was mining fine last night, and then this morning I paused for a bit and then turned it back on and I stopped getting payments. I haven’t gotten a single one for 13+ hours of mining. (I’m connected to the p2p pool). The log in the command prompt looked just the same as last night, but my wallet didn’t receive any payments for today.
I rooted around a bit and found that my firewall had started blocking the miner. I adjusted the permissions for the miner, but I’m not sure how to check if it worked. I was still getting shares and they were being accepted while the firewall was blocking it, or that’s what it looked like, and everything looked the same as before when it was working, so I’m not sure how to check if everything is working correctly again. When I open the firewall/antivirus it brags about “blocking over 1000 bad connections” (good work, buddy xP) but doesn’t seem to tell me when these occurred so I could figure out if it’s still going on.
Another thing that’s confusing me is that the time stamps for the transactions last night that are in my wallet aren’t the same as the times stamps on the explore.feathercoin page. I don’t know if that’s related.
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First of all welcome to the forum.
The connection from your miner to the pool is an outbound connection, which normally is not blocked by a firewall, unless you configure it to do so.
Regarding the time stamps. Can it be due to a different time zone? More important is, that the hashes of the blocks are identical.
To discuss further, can you provide some information?
- OS you use
- mining software you use
- the p2pool node you are connecting to
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Hi and welcome to the forum. Also, check the PC time is correct.
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Thank you!
Time differences could be it. My wallet doesn’t show the hashes of the blocks in the “transactions” screen. Is there a way to check that?
I’m using windows, CCMINER-X64-75, connected to stratum+tcp://172.93.52.247:19327.
Check PC time is correct
That might have been it. It my time zone incorrect.
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It my time zone incorrect.
*It had my time zone incorrect
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Update: this morning I got a message in terminal that said “Stratum connection interrupted” and then “… retry after 30 seconds” a couple times. I restarted the miner and got “…retry after 30 seconds” a few times. I restarted it again, this time using tcp://62.121.77.72:19327 it looks like it’s working normally, every once in a while I get a message that says “accepted: x/y(diff 0.z), 6251.aa kH/s yes!” where the letters are various numbers, but my wallet hasn’t registered any transactions (It’s been about 4 hours). How long should I be connected to a node before I should expect to start getting payments?
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@gonnaforget said in How do you make sure that your firewall isn't stopping the miner's connections?:
ong should I be connected to a node before I should expect to start getting payments
- Check the page of the pool for your miner’s address
- check if the address is the one of your wallet
- check if a payout is shown for your miner
- wait for the next block found by p2pool
Short time later the payment should arrive.
Important: p2pool accepts ANY string as username and if it is not your wallet address you never will get a payment
- Check the page of the pool for your miner’s address
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Thank you, Wellenreiter. The page doesn’t list connected miners. I’ll try switching to one that does.
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Update: I didn’t see myself on the list even after waiting several minutes. Reinstalled ccminer, I can now see myself on the list of miners. Looking good, will update in a bit.
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Update: I dropped off the list after about a half hour even though from my end everything looked fine. My firewall said it had blocked incoming connections. Everything on my end continued to look fine. Contacted my firewall/antivirus provider. They couldn’t find a problem suggested I talk to you guys. I exempted the miner from the firewall, though. I don’t know how to check what the firewall was blocking, is there a way to find that out? I mean, I imagine it would be in a log somewhere. It doesn’t seem obvious how to find that out using their ui.
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Update: I tried connecting using a new address and so far that’s working fin as in I’m on the list, however, the packet loss was quite intense for a bit, even though it’s geographically quite close to me.
I have a question about shares/payouts. Do you only get paid for blocks that you have a share for, so that if the pool mines something that you didn’t contribute to you get nothing, and similarly if you share something on a block that the pool doesn’t get you also get nothing?
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I’m pretty frustrated. I was on the list, I’m sure it’s my address, I had a share during the block, we mined the block, and my wallet didn’t do anything. Do you have to be connected for a certain amount of time before you get rewarded?
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Being on the list is one thing but did it say that you had any shares on the p2p? I noticed that very often when my payout would be below 0.1FTC it just said that i didn’t had any shares and i didn’t got paid. Also the shares that you see in your miner aren’t your actual shares. They are just created to calculate your hashrate. So you always need to check in pool if you want to know how many shares you have.
Tbh that’s why i stopped mining on p2p. With my 1Mh/s sometimes i didn’t got any shares at all over night.
I am mining on miningpoolhub currently and reach a payout of around 13 FTC each day.
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Thank you for your reply, Tobi. I’ve signed up with them and it is a lot steadier/more info available about what’s going on. I am a bit cautious about how large the pool is, though. Seems like there’s a bit of a risk of centralization.
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You get payed by the p2pool as soon as a block is found and makes it into the blockchain, if
- your miner is shown in the list of connected miners.
That means it has submitted shares to the pool
AND - there is a payout shown in your miners entry
AND - the payment is above the minimum payment ~ 0.01 FTC, but I’m not sure.
This is done to avoid dust payments, which hardly can be used.
If your miner is in the list and later doesn’t show up anymore, this means, that the pool node didn’t see shares from your miner for a longer time (~ 5-10 minutes).
If that happens often, add a factor at the end of your miners addressThe syntax is something like this: <miner address>+0.01 this tells the pool to inject a higher number of ‘easy’ shares and the miner returns the results more often.
You should adjust the factor, so that your miner sends shares every one to two minutes.Another thing that is worth mentioning is, that all p2pool nodes build one virtual p2pool so your percentage of the payout is calculated based on the Global hash rate shown on the pool nodes web interface and not on the local hash rate of the p2pool node.
- your miner is shown in the list of connected miners.
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Thank you! I think that explains it. If I wasn’t getting above the minimum payment I wasn’t getting anything, even if it looked to me like I was getting shares. (I was getting stratum off 1000+, so I had used the -f function to try to reduce the difficulty) I guess I could go back and check the difficulty of the blocks that I was getting payments on and see that they were the easy ones.
Was the .01 (or whatever, but I believe the .01 because all the payments I’ve gotten with Mining Pool Hub have been less than that) set back before the current run-up in difficulty? It might be a thing to reduce the threshold a touch now that the difficulty is consistently above what it used to be. Would it be possible to make it automatically scale with the difficulty?
