Moving my umbrel to a relative’s house with more stable internet (stuck with DSL here). Do I need to close out all lightning channels before shutting down? Anything else I should do?
No, you don’t have to close any channels, you can just gracefully shut down the node and then move it over to your relative’s house and then start it right back up, and it’ll be fine as long you’re not keeping the node shut down for longer than 24 hours or so.
If you have access to SSH: you can do sudo shutdown -h now
or the Umbrel dashboard at umbrel.local or the IP address of your node: Settings > Shutdown
Thanks, that’s helpful. Out of curiosity, is the 24 hour rule a universal constant built into the lightning network, or is it just a common convention on closing channels?
The 24 hours downtime is a common courtesy, and if you really want – you can let the other channel operators to know that you’ll be down for at a minimum of 4 hours as that’s usually how long your node’s lightning channel would take to resync with the rest of the network. Personally, I’d be pretty upset if someone had a LN channel with me and they’re down for more than 24 hours, you know? The less downtime, the better – usually common in computer networks.
1 Like