Au stratum server seems to be working...somewhat.

despite the issues greatwolf found us a block

How do I mine by IP? I'm using cgminer

Aaaand DNS is back
should have stayed in bed an extra hour and missed al, the fun 

Looks like the DNS host is down yet again ... Please continue to use by IP until we are 100% sure things are back to normal.



Edit: I found out that my local cache is still being a pain... URL's resolve now...

disadvantages of central infrastructure.. perhaps namecoin could solve this ?

Mh, the point I see is: it would force the miners to run a nmc-daemon for having an own "dns-server".
But other disadvantages I do not see right now, as time to sync etc. seems not to be better with dns.
and this could save some costs for hosting a pool when we think some time ahead because you can (merge)mine sufficient nmc to "pay" the system..

so what needs to be solved that you want to jump in?

very true but p2pool has other issues that cost miners revenues (I mean beside the work running the pool themself and keeping it up to date state of the art..) e.g. with increased stealth rate .. or is that solved already?

From earlier posts I gathered that dynamic difficulty is adjusted per worker connection, so I could have a fast miner doing high difficulty shares and a slower miner doing diff 1 shares on the same worker account. However, all my miners are doing diff 1 shares when vardiff is set to -1. The fastest is just 2GH/s, so it might not be enough to trigger a change. I tried manually adjusting vardiff to 4, but my miners are still doing difficulty 1 work after reconnecting. Do I have to disconnect all miners simultaneously before the change takes effect, or could there be some other issue?

Bug found and squashed!  You should now be able to edit your worker profile, change the vardiff, and restart your rigs with the new settings. 
Sorry for the inconvenience, and thanks for help finding that bug!