Is there some way to verify it's indeed merged mining, locally?
bump - I have this same question as I'm investigating now, seeing the same results as you as well... Trying to get my head around p2pool and it's capabilities/limitations
As long as it says "new merged mining work received" you are good to go. There is no other indication to look for other than a chunk of coins when you find an altcoin block.
the difficulty is really high on ixcoin and namecoin. keep in mind when you merge mine with p2pool, you're using your hashpower only for the altcoins. it'll likely be a while before you get a block.
M
Thanks, was curious about that part and assumed that was the case but still curious. So I got all of them working (BTC, NMC, IXC) except DVC.... not sure why but that one always gives me failed to get auxblock messages (had to take each one out and add back in unfortunately to figure this out .... is there any better info for debugging?). Is there something special about devcoin that I need to do in order to get it to merge mine properly? My conf files are more or less very cookie cutter at this point.
Devcoin isn't any different. Just make sure you don't have a typo in the username/password/port.