Solo mining: gen=1 needed when using minerd? I'm guessing maxcoind follows the same conventions as bitcoind. I've read up most everything except the actual source code but it seems that's the only place to find my answer!

Anyways, so when I go ./maxcoind getmininginfo - I get hasheshpersec = a fraction of what's pumped into it by ./minerd.

When I go ./maxcoind setgenerate false, hasheshpersec drops to 0... while minerd still happily spits out a huge KH/s rating per thread. 

My question is thus: Does the wallet daemon (maxcoind/bitcoind) need generation to be set to on in order to mine solo with minerd?

And why doesn't those hashes show up in hashespersec?

As I understand gen=1 makes bitcoind/maxcoind mine... and that makes sense, seeing as that the hashrate reported is basically equivalent to the hashrate per thread I get from minerd. So if that is so, where do I see the total hashrate fed in by minerd?

And also, can I push multiple minerd instances on many PC's into the same wallet daemon? 

Thanks so much for explaining all this!
In the case of bitcoind (as you say, maxcoind should be the same), setgenerate only affects whether bitcoind itself will mine.  It does not need to be on in order for an external mining program such as minerd to work.  All minerd needs is an RPC connection to bitcoind in order to find out what work it needs to do - and bitcoind will happily provide this regardless of the state of setgenerate.

Likewise, getmininginfo and its hashespersec number only reports the status of bitcoind's own mining - it has no way of knowing what other mining programs are running, or getting statistics from them.  minerd reports its own statistics directly to you.

bitcoind's internal mining code is not very well optimized, and isn't economical to use.  I don't know whether maxcoind is the same, but my guess is minerd is better, so just use it instead.  There's no point in using both as they will just compete for CPU resources.

Your final question should really be asked in a separate post, but anyway: there should be no problem with having many minerd instances fetch work from the same bitcoind, within reason.  (If you have millions of minerd's, bitcoind might not be able to keep up.)