Welcome to the community! If you have any questions (no matter how small or silly they may seem) please reach out. I know it can be difficult getting set up, especially if you are aiming to be a solo miner.
For more exposure on your quality Gridcoin related posts, you can add the #beyondbitcoin tag. The whale who resides there, @officialfuzzy, is very supportive of the project.
working up slowly to solo mining, any info you can share would be helpful, think its going to take a bit although once these other machines are up should speed up drastically. Great help so far thank you.
Due to the recent changes with the staking engine (V8) and the upcoming likelihood of fixed block rewards, you will need a significant balance to solo mine. Without a big balance, you won't be able to stake blocks regularly to get paid for your research. Unless you have at least ten thousand GRC, you will be better off in a pool for the time being.
I am not a fan of this, but it's the reality for now... The way research is paid it will likely be changed in future.
Yes, I had to join the GRC pool for the time being. It is very slow going, my last stake keeps disappearing! It was confirmed on the fork, repaired my wallet (update) and it was gone or corrected the blockchain, it made the same stake a second time and got 1 confirmation and now its gone again?
This is happening in your own wallet, right? You staked an orphaned block, which happens frequently on all blockchains. Essentially, two clients staked a block at roughly the same time, and your block had less support so was rejected.
Fear not, the main chain never knew you staked that block, so you lose nothing and will be paid out for research in full when you next stake a block on the main chain.
In shorter terms, both your stakes were on forks, which have low difficulty and thus make it easy to stake. =)
Thank you @dutch, I figured it should stake eventually.