Bug: Command line flag for using remote relay chain on Manta/Calamari node doesn't work

[Curu24]

Hello,

I tried to run Calamari collator with relay-chain-rpc-url flag to specify a remote relay chain RPC to be used instead of the embedded one but the node process crashes on startup.

Here is the full config

ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/polkadot \
  --name Polkadotters \
  --wasm-execution Compiled \
  --telemetry-url 'wss://telemetry.polkadot.io/submit/ 0' \
  --base-path '/var/lib/calamari' \
  --collator \
  --chain /var/lib/calamari/calamari-genesis.json \
  --port 31333 \
  --ws-port 9144 \
  --ws-max-connections 100 \
  --rpc-port 9133 \
  --rpc-cors all \
  --rpc-methods auto \
  --prometheus-port 9615 \
  --prometheus-external \
  --state-cache-size 0 \
  --bootnodes /dns/crispy.calamari.systems/tcp/30333/p2p/12D3KooWNE4LBfkYB2B7D4r9vL54YMMGsfAsXdkhWfBw8VHJSEQc \
  /dns/crunchy.calamari.systems/tcp/30333/p2p/12D3KooWL3ELxcoMGA6han3wPQoym5DKbYHqkWkCuqyjaCXpyJTt \
  /dns/hotdog.calamari.systems/tcp/30333/p2p/12D3KooWBdto53HnArmLdtf2RXzNWti7hD5mML7DWGZPD8q4cywv \
  /dns/tasty.calamari.systems/tcp/30333/p2p/12D3KooWGs2hfnRQ3Y2eAoUyWKUL3g7Jmcsf8FpyhVYeNpXeBMSu \
  /dns/tender.calamari.systems/tcp/30333/p2p/12D3KooWNXZeUSEKRPsp1yiDH99qSVawQSWHqG4umPjgHsn1joci \
  --relay-chain-rpc-url ws://178.170.48.153:9944 \

Here is the error from logs:

May 17 15:04:07 calamari systemd[1]: polkadot.service: Main process exited, code=exited, status=1/FAILURE
May 17 15:04:07 calamari systemd[1]: polkadot.service: Failed with result 'exit-code'.

[Curu24]

Probably updating dependencies to 0.9.32 and above should fix this paritytech/cumulus#1585

[Garandor]

Hi @Curu24, thx for raising the issue.
You are correct, mainnet is running a version of substrate that does not yet support external relaychain clients.
This will become enabled with the next release containing #1029 that added support for it.
I'm actually surprised that our current mainnet client already knows the flag, i would've expected it to complain about unknown parameter instead of crashing at runtime

[Curu24]

yes, it's even listed in the --help for some time already, but only started working since 0.9.32 :)