Broadcasting tx ... : 25 error code: -25?error message:?Missing inputs?

[gonzzza007]

Hi, not sure if this is an issue of C-Lightning but hopefully I can ask for help here. My c-lightning node was working fine until my hard drive crashed. Luckily i had 1 week old backup and was able to restore it. I was also able to partly restore by live database and exported some new data from this database to the old one using sqlite3-cli. And it worked! I had all my new channels working fine.

The only issue left was "error code: 25" error message in log. I have decoded the transaction and found out that the inputs are already spent by my other transaction. But this error message is still there after several upgrades and restarts. "dev-rescan-outputs" not helping in this case, and unfortunately there is no "dev-rescan-inputs" command :)

Can you please advise me - can I somehow delete this transaction manually from the DB or I should do some more research?

I have found several "error code: 25" issues here in GitHub, but seems like there is no common solution, every issue has to be treated depending on the particular case.

Please excuse me if GitHub is not the right place for posting such issues. If so - please advise me where to ask for help with this issue.

[cdecker]

How did you manage to get the database merged? Usually restoring a DB will result in you losing funds. That is due to you losing the latest state for channels and attempting to continue from an old state (i.e., cheat from the point of view of your counterparty) which triggers the punishment from your counterparty. You must have been incredibly lucky not to have lost any funds yet, and I'd advise to drain the node (close channels and withdraw funds) and shut it down.

There is little point in attempting to salvage a node whose DB has been manually altered, merging old and new data. This is true for all implementations btw.

As for the error code 25, that isn't really a problem, it usually just means that the transaction was already processed by Bitcoin but we're just trying to publish out tx anyway.

[gonzzza007]

Well maybe I was lucky. I remember copying data from channels table (only rows that were missing from the backup)...

What concerns a "punishment" is there a way to see my "punished" state somehow? There are indeed some nodes that I never able to connect to, I'm just getting a "success" message, but no channel is created...

But if i decide to keep the node as is (not really big amount of BTC on stake) is there a way to remove this transaction? I don't think it will expire somehow, because it's there for several months already. Or should I check which node this transaction is related to?