Manually disabling a channel is overridden when restarting the node

[bjarnemagnussen]

Background

After manually disabling a channel with lncli updatechanstatus TXID TXIDX --action disable, its state will be overridden as a automatically managed disabled channel (ChanStatusDisabled) on node restart.

After the channel is considered stable, it will then be automatically be enabled, hence completely overriding the state set manually prior to the restart.

The reason seems to be due to the function loadInitialChanState inside netann/chan_status_manager.go, which is not able to distinguish between if the last channel update was disabled automatically (ChanStatusDisabled) or manually (ChanStatusManuallyDisabled).

lnd/netann/chan_status_manager.go

Lines 664 to 668 in 42099ef

	if lastUpdate.ChannelFlags&lnwire.ChanUpdateDisabled == 0 {
	initialStatus = ChanStatusEnabled
	} else {
	initialStatus = ChanStatusDisabled
	}

Your environment

• version of lnd: 0.13.0-rc.5

Steps to reproduce

Manually disable a channel lncli updatechanstatus TXID TXIDX --action disable, restart the node, wait for the ChanEnableTimeout to pass, then the channel will be enabled.

Expected behaviour

I think it should stay manually disabled also after a node restart.

Actual behaviour

The channel is loaded as automatically disabled and then automatically enabled when the channel is stable.

[wpaulino]

Good observation! Unfortunately this will require the state to be written to disk if we want to support this. One possible workaround would be to run the command/RPC manually after restarts, so that channels don't automatically get re-enabled.

[bjarnemagnussen]

Ah yes. In that case I will change the helper text for the command to add this as a note, for as long as it is not picked up.

[Roasbeef]

Unfortunately this will require the state to be written to disk if we want to support this

We purposefully didn't do this the first time around to simplify the implementation.