Inbound peer Count

DIY Community Support
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I assume many folks here (including myself) are newcomers running Bitcoin Knots, welcome!

I know that our nodes run over tor, thus meaning that the inbound connections we receive are not through clearnet. That being said, I know the amount of connections we receive will be relatively low (based on what ive read in other forums of course)- however, is anyone able to consistently maintain an inbound connection count above 3? This seems to be my baseline, and strangely enough (not sure how to properly word this next one) I’m not even sure if they’re real inbound connections, since the logs make no mention of “inbound” peers- only outbound and “New block-relay-only v2 peer” connections.

  • Is there any start-cli command beyond the logs I can be using while I’m ssh’d in to get more info?
  • Have others been experiencing the same thing?
  • Lastly, have others been able to maintain an inbound peer count consistently above 3 connections?

I greatly appreciate any interaction, if you’re reading this and haven’t created an account yet and the question resonates with you, please take 2 minutes to sign up! Trying to get some discourse on this one.

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It makes sense if you think about it that Knots prioritizes logging your outbound connections – you need to be able to download blocks and broadcast transactions, anything others do via you is their concern. That said, I’m not immediately familiar with what the Knots team have decided to log and at what level of priority. Whether peers use your somewhat slower to respond Tor node or choose not to isn’t really something you’d need to be concerned about. There’s no command you can run to force peers to connect to you, they will and do when they want to, as you have seen.

That said, yes, you’re able to SSH into your server, then enter into your Bitcoin container and run all the commands you like.
The guides are found in our documentation:

1 Like
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Appreciate the reply, thank you kindly!

I was able to enter the container and then use

sudo podman exec -it bitcoind.embassy bitcoin-cli getpeerinfo

to view peer info. I restarted my knots implementation so it may take some more time for peers to find me (if they want to), but i’ll continue to monitor it and will post anything helpful here so that others can see it too.

Thank you for the informative references!

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Hi,

yes also a newcomer, yes seeing the same:
(3 in / 10 out) is current and usual, often just 1 or 2 in.
thanks for asking… i have learned a little more.

1 Like
5

Thanks for the reply here @Niney ! Glad this helped give you even just a little information or context, this is what its all about & its a large reason why I made this post, because theres no way i’m the only person seeing what i’m seeing.

With that being said, i’ve checked my inbound connection count again today and I can see that the number has crawled up to 6 inbounds. So if anyone else has this concern, worry not! Keep your node running alongside your knots implementation, and in due time you’ll see the inbound connection counts creep up.