⚡ Rebuilding from the Ashes: A Node Operator's Journey ⚡
Posted 5 months ago by sniffit
In the world of Lightning, things rarely break quietly. Over the past week, our node faced one of its most challenging trials—an unexpected decoupling of its infrastructure stack that spiraled into lost connections, misconfigured Tor services, and disrupted channel visibility.
It started with the physical hardware - randomly flinging errors and blinking amber lights. Mind you, these are Dell PowerEdge R630s - built for production and data center use. But as in Murphy's Law, the worse case that can happen - will happen.
Bitcoind had to be reindex - LND effectively yeeted to the void and everything was silent.
It started with the physical hardware - randomly flinging errors and blinking amber lights. Mind you, these are Dell PowerEdge R630s - built for production and data center use. But as in Murphy's Law, the worse case that can happen - will happen.
Bitcoind had to be reindex - LND effectively yeeted to the void and everything was silent.
But Lightning isn't about giving up when things go dark. It's about finding a way to restore that spark.
Through long nights, countless reconnect attempts, and relentless troubleshooting, I had to:
- Rebuild the Bitcoin and Lightning stack for clearer separation of responsibilities.
- Untangled conflicting Tor hidden services to restore proper node identity on the network.
- Reconnected to thousands of peers to reestablish our presence in the global Lightning graph.
- Watched as gossip propagation slowly restored our channels to the public network view.
The process wasn’t clean, easy, or painless. But it was necessary.
This isn’t a victory lap—it’s a reminder to every node runner: your node will face failures. What matters is how you respond.
We're still standing. Channels may have been lost. Lessons were gained. And we keep building forward.
- sniffit
0263a27989d64b6eca6958cfb60cc05fc641db6a258e91b9274d7042dd19bb8c88
- sniffit
0263a27989d64b6eca6958cfb60cc05fc641db6a258e91b9274d7042dd19bb8c88
4 Comments
LightningNetworkLiquidity wrote 5 months ago
What was the nature of the hardware failure?
sniffit wrote 5 months ago
@LightningNetworkLiquidity,
We traced the root cause to a faulty memory module that caused data corruption in our blockchain node’s storage. This left the node in an inconsistent state, requiring a full reindex to restore integrity. The affected hardware has since been replaced, and no further faults have been observed.
This incident also gave us the opportunity to test our disaster recovery plans from when the node was first deployed. It surfaced some gaps—particularly in the LND node recovery process—which led to the difficult but necessary decision to force-close the channels, recover available funds and retire the affected pubkey.
I’m now performing a full infrastructure overhaul, placing additional emphasis on resilience testing, fault tolerance, and isolated fault domain containment before rejoining the network as an active routing node.
LightningNetworkLiquidity wrote 5 months ago
Just one question.
Why did you need to re-index the blockchain?
My understanding is that lnd using a bitcoind backend does not require txindex to be turned on.
Why did you need to re-index the blockchain?
My understanding is that lnd using a bitcoind backend does not require txindex to be turned on.
"A routing node will not aggressively prune their Bitcoin backend. They might consider indexing the Blockchain to be able to look up transactions faster." [source]
Thanks again for your time and assistance.
sniffit wrote 5 months ago
Great question — and you’re right that lnd doesn’t require txindex=1 to function in most standard setups.
In our case, the memory-induced corruption left both the bitcoind data directory and chain state in an indeterminate state. As my oprational principle has been centered around "Trust, but always verify", I felt that it was a reasonable course of action to take.
While a reindex-chainstate may have been sufficient, I opted for a full reindex to:
- Completely validate historical block data (not just chainstate),
- Rule out any silent corruption across blk*.dat files,
- And rebuild all indexes from clean disk reads to avoid carrying forward latent errors.
I also enabled txindex=1 as part of our re-architecture, not because it’s strictly required, but:
We plan to run analysis tools, chantools, and index-driven diagnostics directly on-chain, and perhaps leverage data-driven route peering and fee adjustments
It’s part of a broader shift toward running a resilient, auditable routing node — and in that context, indexing isn’t a must, but it’s a tradeoff I am comfortable with.
Thanks again for asking — I do hope this answers your question sufficiently.
In our case, the memory-induced corruption left both the bitcoind data directory and chain state in an indeterminate state. As my oprational principle has been centered around "Trust, but always verify", I felt that it was a reasonable course of action to take.
While a reindex-chainstate may have been sufficient, I opted for a full reindex to:
- Completely validate historical block data (not just chainstate),
- Rule out any silent corruption across blk*.dat files,
- And rebuild all indexes from clean disk reads to avoid carrying forward latent errors.
I also enabled txindex=1 as part of our re-architecture, not because it’s strictly required, but:
We plan to run analysis tools, chantools, and index-driven diagnostics directly on-chain, and perhaps leverage data-driven route peering and fee adjustments
It’s part of a broader shift toward running a resilient, auditable routing node — and in that context, indexing isn’t a must, but it’s a tradeoff I am comfortable with.
Thanks again for asking — I do hope this answers your question sufficiently.
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