Custom altcoin won't sync with node and neither will accept a miner connection
Although this is rather old, I thought I should at least provide my knowledge on this - although it shows "0" blocks of transaction history, and continually states that it is catching up, it is however up to date - depending on the circumstances. First, you need to open "checkpoints.cpp" and remove all the checkpoints in the file (they'll be somewhere in the first 20 lines, it's fairly self explanatory), and create one checkpoint at 0 with the genesis block hash - the genesis block checkpoint. After you've done that, rebuild both clients, connect them, and instead of using minerd (or equivalent), instead use "setgenerate" through the console for at least 1 block. After that 1 block, you should be able to use minerd (or equivalent). Hope this helps for you