Does the watchtower work? Do I need to do some port forwarding while setting up a watchtower for others to use?

Hello.

So I am trying to understand how LND watchtowers work in greater technical detail, and I have two questions:

1) I connected to few watchtowers and now I am wondering if they do really work. When I list them via

lncli wtclient towers

I get something like

"towers": [
        {
            "pubkey": "watchtower's pubkey",
            "addresses": [
                "onion_address.onion:9911"
            ],
            "active_session_candidate": true,
            "num_sessions": 0,
            "sessions": [
            ],
            "session_info": [
                {
                    "active_session_candidate": true,
                    "num_sessions": 0,
                    "sessions": [
                    ],
                    "policy_type": "ANCHOR"
                },
                {
                    "active_session_candidate": true,
                    "num_sessions": 0,
                    "sessions": [
                    ],
                    "policy_type": "LEGACY"
                }
            ]
        },
{more watchtowers} ...]

So does this mean that this particular watchtower does indeed work? What confuses me are those "num_sessions": 0 lines. If the wtclient session is not established I cannot send any backups to that watchtower and therefore the whole thing is useless, is that right?

2) I am also trying to set up a watchtower service for my friends. I am wondering if I have to bother with some port forwarding (of port :9911) or if it is simply enough to turn it on and send them my URI... (I am running a Tor only node)

Thank you for your answers.

Best regards,

Django Freeman

1 Comment

Django Freeman wrote 6 months ago

UPDATE: two of the watchtowers now have non-zero "num_sessions" so they are obviously working

I also found that there is no need to do any port forwarding with Tor.

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