Is my solo mining pool down?

Why a pool can look down to you but not to us

• Your own connection. If your miner or your router has lost its connection, every pool looks unreachable from there.
• Names. Your miner looks the pool's name up through your router. If that lookup fails, a working pool looks gone. We look each name up once per check.
• Settings and firmware. A typo in the pool address, the wrong port, a TLS port on firmware without TLS, or a miner the pool does not accept all look like a pool that does not answer.
• The path in between. The route from your network to a pool can fail while ours works, and the other way round. Our probe sits on one home line in Java, Indonesia. “Not answering” means it got no answer from there, and these pages never claim more than that.
• The website is not the stratum port. A pool's stats page can be up while its stratum port is not, and the other way round. These checks are made on the stratum port, the one your miner connects to.

If your pool is down

Give your miner a second pool. Bitaxe (AxeOS) and NerdQAxe miners have a fallback pool slot, and the miner mines there whenever its primary pool stops answering. Any second pool works; what matters is that it is a different pool from your primary, and that the fallback's User field holds your own Bitcoin address.

• How to set up a fallback pool on a Bitaxe
• Check the User field in your fallback slot

How we check

Our probe opens a connection to each endpoint's stratum port, sends one mining.subscribe and waits for the pool's answer. It never logs in, never mines and never submits a share. It runs from one home internet connection in Java, Indonesia: not your connection, and not a data centre. We run one of the pools on these pages, SoloLuck, and it is checked the same way. SoloLuck has not found a Bitcoin block.

The full method, including how a pool operator can stop these checks with two lines in robots.txt.