Lightning Terminal failed Health Check

Services Support
1

Having successfully upgraded to Start9 0.4.0-1 and updated all the services, my Lightning Terminal (ver 0.17.3-alpha:0) now keeps failing its health check. This is a snippet from the log file:

2026-08-31T18:28:04+01:00  2026-08-31 17:28:04.487 [INF] LITD: Handling REST request: /v1/status
2026-08-31T18:28:04+01:00  2026-08-31 17:28:04.488 [INF] LITD: Handling gRPC request: /litrpc.Status/SubServerStatus
2026-08-31T18:28:04+01:00  Health Check lit failed: Lightning Terminal failed to start: could not start Lit: received critical error from subsystem, shutting down: RPC middleware receive failed: rpc error: code = Unavailable desc = error reading from server: EOF

Doing a quick online search for this error, came up with the following:


"The error RPC middleware receive failed: rpc error: code = Unavailable desc = error reading from server: EOF indicates that Lightning Terminal (LiT) cannot communicate with LND because the RPC middleware is not enabled on the LND node. 

To resolve this, you must:

Enable RPC Middleware: Add the line rpcmiddleware.enable=true to your LND configuration file (lnd.conf). 
Restart LND: Restart the LND service to ensure it registers the new configuration and starts the middleware listener. 
Verify Macaroons (if applicable): If the error persists or changes to a permission error, ensure you are using an admin session (created with --type=admin) and that the correct macaroon files (admin.macaroon) are present and accessible in your LND data directory."

When I looked at the LND config, there’s no mention of RPC or middleware, so I wouldn’t be able to enable it even if I wanted to.

Has anyone else experienced this error, and come up with a fix?

2

That error looks worse than it is. Lightning Terminal keeps a live control connection (the “RPC middleware”) open to LND, and the EOF means LND dropped that connection because LND restarted or was briefly unavailable right as Lightning Terminal was starting, which is common on the reboot after an OS update.

When that happens, litd gives up and sits with an error rather than retrying, so the health check stays red until the service is restarted.
None of the middleware stuff is relevant to StartOS here.

  1. Check LND’s service page first — it should be Running with green health checks.
  2. Then simply Restart the Lightning Terminal service. It should come up green and stay green.

If it goes red again with the same message soon after, that means LND itself is restarting underneath it then make sure LND is on 0.21.2-beta:4 (check the marketplace for updates), then have a look at LND’s logs for restarts and post what you find.

3

Thanks for that info. Yesterday, I updated LND (0.21.2.beta5), Lightning Terminal (0.17.3.alpha1), and Mempool & RTL. Everything appears to be running smoothly, but I will keep an eye on things to see if the issue arises again.

Nothing unusual appeared in the LND logs before the update, so still none the wiser as to what actually happened.

4

Yeah, in the latest LiT I added a small check to make sure it doesn’t happen again, even though personally I couldn’t quite time it right to see what you happened to see.