Channel stuck waiting close after automated recovery

Support and Troubleshooting
1

After automated recovery from power/hardware failure using the channel backup file, 1 channel is not closing after 6 days so far.

Below is the pending channels details. I see mention of ChanStatusLocalDataLoss|ChanStatusRestored, which might be cause but cant figure out how to recover.

I have contact with other node, they have tried to close on their end but get message ‘They sent ERROR channel 067…: unable to resume channel, recovery required’

Any help would very much be appreciated.

“pending_force_closing_channels”: ,
“waiting_close_channels”: [
{
“channel”: {
“remote_node_pub”: “03627ebe50fc6eb80b0caab0c3714958c701eda735e3c29588e83150d6d4a93976”,
“channel_point”: “1752571bafee62e7494686cc2774a372c128fcb2f613e43c72077de83a5c7606:0”,
“capacity”: “3000000”,
“local_balance”: “0”,
“remote_balance”: “0”,
“local_chan_reserve_sat”: “0”,
“remote_chan_reserve_sat”: “0”,
“initiator”: “INITIATOR_LOCAL”,
“commitment_type”: “ANCHORS”,
“num_forwarding_packages”: “0”,
“chan_status_flags”: “ChanStatusLocalDataLoss|ChanStatusRestored”,
“private”: true,
“memo”: “”
},
“limbo_balance”: “0”,
“commitments”: {
“local_txid”: “”,
“remote_txid”: “”,
“remote_pending_txid”: “”,
“local_commit_fee_sat”: “0”,
“remote_commit_fee_sat”: “0”,
“remote_pending_commit_fee_sat”: “0”
},
“closing_txid”: “”,
“closing_tx_hex”: “”
}
]

2

I’m not aware of this error code, are they running CLN? Have you been able to confirm whether they tried a force-close?

If they tried an FC and still no good, you may want to check out chan-tools, specifically the following section:

  • My channel peer is online, but they don’t force close a channel when using a channel.backup file.This can have many reasons. Often it means the channels is a legacy channel type (not an anchor output channel) and the force close transaction the peer has doesn’t have enough fees to make it into the mempool. In that case waiting for an empty mempool might be the only option. Another reason might be that the peer is a CLN node with a specific version that doesn’t react to force close requests normally. You can use the chantools triggerforceclose command in that case (should work with CLN peers of a certain version that don’t respond to normal force close requests).

Certainly worth it to read the whole readme though.

4

What’s the exact command you’re firing?
Have a look at the examples listed here.

6

Thanks. Perhaps the default blockstream API did something weird. You could append the following to switch to a different blockexplorer, such as

sudo chantools triggerforceclose --peer 03627ebe50fc6eb80b0caab0c3714958c701eda735e3c29588e83150d6d4a93976@184.75.221.211:39880 --channel_point 0343cf3d12ed8208aade0c7c3e8b7f5f64256e7175905b2137c2adb077bd849:0 --apiurl "https://mempool.space/api/v1"

while I’m not sure what the right url would be. Could be explored here.

On the other node: I don’t see any node-OS automatically force-closing channels after 2 weeks. If the other node goes belly up, the funds are lost for both of you. Don’t want to spread panic, but I wouldn’t sit on my hands in those two weeks. :person_shrugging: