Steps for Waiting Close Channels and Unconfirmed Transactions

Please share your best tips on resolving Waite Close and Unconfirmed Transactions!

Here’s some helpful ways,

This is typically the process to bump/get funds out of waiting close channels:

You can prepend all commands for lncli like so:
sudo ~/umbrel/scripts/app compose lightning exec lnd lncli

For details on “accessing the lncli” (which is what we’re doing here to interact with LND)
As well as details on how to run the commands on your Umbrel you can reference instructions under “How to SSH” in the FAQ guide

You can use this command to see status of channels:
~/umbrel/scripts/app compose lightning exec lnd lncli pendingchannels

Any channels stuck in waiting close with a problematic peer you can attempt to force close: ~/umbrel/scripts/app compose lightning exec lnd lncli closechannel --force

You can also see how that process looks in an easy guide here

It can take up to 2 weeks for offline/zombie channels to close and for those funds in problematic channels to return back onchain to your node- if in the off chance we have zombie channels we can try to reach out to the peer directly to request a close on their side if you know who they are

Or we’d have to move to other manual intervention steps like Guggero’s chantools
As a note this is a very technical process and it’s usually easiest to wait for funds to return on chain, when performing an automated recovery be sure to check “Yes” to you had open channels and then wait for them to finish scanning and closing

Otherwise this is chantools: GitHub - lightninglabs/chantools: A loose collection of tools all somehow related to lnd and Lightning Network channels.

Here are also a lot of other helpful resources in this regard:

What Are Zombie Lightning Channels? - The Bitcoin Manual.

https://node-recovery.com/

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