I have exactly the same issue here. My node was offline, tried to recover but there is one channel which has a status of waiting close. I tried to force close it but there is no maturity height.
Local and remote balance are shown 0, but in fact I have 1 mil sats sitting there.
I really appreciate if you could share your experience if you could resolve this issue!
My node was offline, tried to recover but there is one channel which has a status of waiting close.
What exactly did you do, could you outline the steps?
In case you did a static channel backup (SCB), none of the steps outlined in the guide would help, since your LND isn’t really aware of what happened. You would need to either
fire the SCB again, which basically signals a “please force-close” signal to your channel-peer
try to reach your channel-peer via amboss or 1ml and ask them to force-close
use chan-tools to trigger the force-close
The steps are more detailed here.
What’s worth noting that I’m not too familiar how the Umbrel recovery works. That might be another option, someone who’s more knowledgable on this could chime in here (or the Umbrel telegram channel).
I’m just a user that has gone through the process a while ago now. But it seems to me as though you only need to give it time (Days). Your output suggests to me that your channel is closing and that it has 1,000,000 sats in it. You will get back a little less than that. I suspect that you can use the node id to search mempool and walk the the tx outputs to find the closing transaction.
@jlu@Hakuna
Hi mates, thanks for getting back to me.
I don’t think the channel is closing because I can see transaction I made for opening the channel and my fund is sitting there in a wallet
I’m running on Raspi4 , Umbrel OS 0.5.4
So to give you a background of my issue, my node was offline, tried to restore the lightning, everything worked and force closed, except one channel which I have 1 mil sat sitting there, the channel state is waiting close but it shows 0 inbound and outbound(see attached)
The remote peer seems to be also offline for couple months.
I followed this instruction:
I managed to install the chantools but running into this error when I try to force close:
error parsing channel point: invalid channel point format: [ed76e2777c449526cfc581c63a9226a71e0854c362984b0391cb4a2012d69b7e]
I can’t find the channel on LND but the channel point redirects me to the initial transaction which I initiated to open the channel and as I said I can see the 1 mil sats sitting there in a wallet:
I have no idea what is going on and how can I recover my fund!
But if the other end of the channel is down and your data has no Local or remote balance; I can’t see how a closing transaction can calculate the value of funds to send to each party.
So if the other side is down, too, it’s going to be tricky. Let’s handle steps for this situation at the end. But first
Can you share the chantools command exactly? I think you may have forgotten the vout at the end. See the original post from Guggero, it needs to be --channel_point ed76e2777c449526cfc581c63a9226a71e0854c362984b0391cb4a2012d69b7e:0. Don’t forget the :0 at the end
If both are offline, I think that might become quite tricky. I don’t have practical experience with that, but I heard that some people just load their node in Zeus and close there. But I don’t want to refer to something I’m not familiar with. So two practical links instead
Darthcoin’s SHTF Scenarios. There is a copy in the Guides here, but the one I’m linking is more recently updated
@Hakuna
Well I fixed the channel point in chantools command, but didn’t help, you can see the result and error attached,
I was also asking for help in telegram Plebnet group. Unfortunately I have been told that there is no way I can get my fund back because the other node is also offline for more than 2 months! This is really sad and devastating! I tried to contact the node on lightning network plus but no response.
I don’t know if there is any other way around to get my hard earned sats back!
Can you check whether you’re showing up in their closed channel list? They don’t seem to have any channel online. That means either something’s wrong in their close list, or they have closed with you, which gives you the closing tx and presuming that your onchain wallet has the sats, your node just doesn’t know about it.
Man this is screwed.
It looks like the following happened:
The channel opening started on 2023-07-19, but with a too low fee (it was the mempool fee crazy time)
It didn’t get confirmed within the 2 weeks (2016 blocks) maximum time. You should have bumped the fees here
Miners confirmation finally happened on 2023-09-29, but way beyond max-time. You should have force-closed here
Beyond max-time means that after 2 weeks pending open, your channel partner discards the channel, and it never really got confirmed. This is the reason for my previous post observation, the peer never saw the channel, all their channels are closed, because for them, you are not a channel peer
This seems to me like a fubar situation, and the only resolution we could ponder about is whether you have your channel.db, from whatever backup state available. Get your node online with that and see if LND force-closes automatically (since you come online with an old state).
Or, you reach the channel peer, but I wouldn’t know what they would be able to do, since they forgot your channel opening in September 2023.
Lastly, you can take my post and take it to the LND slack channel I shared earlier, or open a github issue in LND and see if Oliver has any other idea. But you may need to accept to
either find your channel.db
reach out to the peer and ask them for cooperative help (BitcoinAkademin.se)
@Hakuna
Hey mate thanks a lot for all your digging and information!
You are totally right, seems I tried to open the channel with low fees, I forgot about it and it got confirmed after 2 months! F^*K ME!
Well I tried reaching out to the peer but no chance. We created a swap on LN+. Looks like a Swedish organization, found their email address on their website but unfortunately even the email messages do not deliver.
Honestly I’m not very technical and not sure how I can retrieve the channel.db. How could that help?
I have all my channel backups as I was running bos telegram bot and I was regularly getting SCB backups. As I mentioned earlier, my node crashed and I had to restore it, using my seed and SCB. Not sure if that would effect the channel.db!
The LND slack channel link you sent to me has not been working "This link is no longer active
"
If I could get my hard earned 1 mil sats back, I’m definitely willing to give away a portion of it as a gratitude for supporting me in here.
Honestly I’m not very technical and not sure how I can retrieve the channel.db. How could that help?
So the channel.db is the actual file where your channel-states are stored, while the SCB file only gives a “current state” of all your active channels. I’m actually not aware of how the umbrel recovery works, let’s hope it’s not scraping your whole SSD. Let’s check whether you can find it on your disk with this command: sudo find / -iname "channel.db*"
The LND slack channel link you sent to me has not been working “This link is no longer active”
Lastly, your last shot at reaching the peer seems to be either finding and contacting the owner of the domain in the domain registry, and try DM’ing them on X (though it might be disbanded, too): x.com
Btw I saw your note in Plebnet Telegram. Suggest we continue there, because there are plenty of knowledgable peers. You can find my telegram handle on my amboss page (click my avatar here)
Thank you @Hakuna for your guide. I was able to bump fee to accelerate my closing channel transaction.
I want to give additional guide from my recent experience.
First, use this command to find the ID of your dockers
sudo docker ps -a
Second, use this command to find the closing tx-id and index (equal to channel_point:vout)
sudo docker exec -it “your docker id of lightning and” lncli listunspent
Third, find the closing channel status (force or coperative close) with lncli pendingchannels
Lastly, note that Umbrel default config use automatic bump fee mechanism. I input 10 sat per vbyte. Initially the LND sweeper used only 2.1 sats, after 1-2 block confirmations, it increased the fee to 4 sats, then 6 sats, and finally to 25 sat per vbyte where my transaction was finally confirmed. In reality, I overpaid 2 times of the optimal fees shown in the mempool.
Don’t forget the 
This is really sad and devastating! I tried to contact the node on lightning network plus but no response.