^ This. Everyone could benefit from running a signet test node as a dev environment and to learn more about bitcoin/lightning. And almost nobody (as a percentage of the population) should run a production lightning node on mainnet :)

I also see uneconomical forwards that seem incomprehensible. It seems that fees don't matter so much to real traffic. Only rebalancers seem to set fee limits in routing consistently. Many wallets like Alby appear to blindly send traffic, accepting whatever fees get the transaction to the destination with the most certainty according to their liveness metrics--but real traffic is fine paying higher fees.

This makes some sense, as Joe-Bob buying alligator jerky from Tom's Apocalypse Shack doesn't really care if he's paying 2-3% in lightning fees for the purchase.

Yes. Zap-O-Matic is connected and it's been working well :)

Are these two your lightning nodes?

Zaprite (01): https://amboss.space/node/03d7582343e179601979ba7e8ca61e35668992ac89326da1b53bfa60537f935957

and

zaprite-lnd: https://amboss.space/node/025ee809529b1e929007d91fb0a7eeeb5f9954e5939b647ab517d8d69c231d4f6c

Asking because that second one doesn't have any owner info and might be someone else pretending to be you for the connections.

Interested in opening a channel to Zap-O-Matic for more routing connections? :)

postgreSQL db replication can be done across machines and data-centers--that's more of a cloud-centric model for scaling and redundancy, but if you want to be as production grade as a social network or financial institution, it might be desired to have the option to do offsite live replication. You can setup postgres in active-active so you could have a failsafe node that boots up and uses a remote copy of the db and just takes over... this is all much more detailed though for a pleb. Mostly, the advice for the node runner starting out is to do some reseach and pick a technology stack that is going to be the direction of least pain for studying and implementing, but in reality, any and all of the options can blow up.

Thanks for the write-up. I hope you stick around in the community. We are still treading the waters at the edge of the world, recklessly throwing our coins into beta environments and tools. But over time, it all gets easier and more stable, so maybe in 6-12 months there will be a reason to start up again :)

Some day I think we will have a publication source where node runners upload anonymous stats so we can see general wide angle trends like 24 activity from Germany to Kenya. That would help node runners see where demand is and make decisions about creating new connections, and it would allow us to see if the network as a whole was slow on a prior day, which might help in automating fee adjustments (not changing them if the network as a whole is the reason for the lower throughput).

my node has slowed over the weekend as well--but I did not raise my fees super high (except for 2 channels that are sinks). The trouble with the opacity of the network is that we can't know if it's just a slow day in general for the network, or for our particular channels...

Sinks need to adopt PeerSwap so we can swap in our sats back in exchange for L-BTC rather than closing channels and re-opening.

correction to the supplies, we ordered 10 of the 256GB USB drives and will use 5 to test on each device (3-4 as RAID and the last as a swap test).

Further errata and corrections will be posted and versioned on github: https://github.com/zapomatic/zapomatic/blob/main/Fault-Tolerant-Umbrel-Home-Pi-5-RAIDZ2-Symlinks-Phase1-TestSetup.md

awesome. Is this an update to rebalance-lnd or are you writing a new script? Seems that this setup would make rebalance-lnd think that we are making a rate that we might not get. If we set these higher rates and then try to rebalance channels, we could be massively overpaying.

lowering the fee back down when the liquidity lowers is also unintuitive. Wouldn't it be better to adjust htlc_max_msat for that channel and just leave the fee static?

There's an amboss group: https://amboss.space/community/181aad24-1871-4be9-ab6d-10ac71383c42

If you run pscli listpeers it will look at all of your currently connected peers and show the ones that have peerswapd running.

and you can add any peer (as just a peer) and they will show up in pscli listpeers as potential peerswap partners even if you don't yet have a channel.

just Gary testing the market reaction.

It's a decent deal to join with the peerswap group and get the L-BTC that someone has already converted and hold that as a bank of rebalance source material. For sure, conversions back and forth are better when done at low fee time--and since this is just on-chain maintenance rather than node communication timeout based transactions, you don't have to worry that it MUST complete within a given timeframe (like you do with channel open) so you can process these in batch and at low fee when convenient.

brilliant.