<blockquote>
  <p>What does this mean? I'm running the command on the same machine where the daemon is running, so no remote connection needed.</p>
</blockquote>

<p>It's not talking about the connection between your command line and the Bitcoin daemon, it's talking about the connection between your Bitcoin daemon and other Bitcoin daemons.</p>

<blockquote>
  <p>How can this happen? Why does a stable running bitcoind daemon suddenly gets disconnected?</p>
</blockquote>

<p>You might be running a very old version of Bitcoin that is incompatible with other clients. Your ISP might be filtering Bitcoin traffic. Your OS might be out of file descriptors. There are a huge number of possible reasons.</p>

<p>To narrow it down, have you tried looking at the debug.log of your Bitcoin client? You could also try looking at TCP traffic on port 8333 using Wireshark.</p>

CC BY-SA 3.0
2014-10-22T02:07:23.337Z
2015-04-19T09:33:52.307Z
2015-04-19T09:33:52.307Z
Nick ODell
<p>I'm building a service which does some automatic Bitcoin transactions and balance checking. In the system I now created some logging, which told me that my bitcoind daemon (running on Ubuntu 14.04 server) gave an error code -9 when running the following command <code>bitcoind getbalance</code>. In the <a href="https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/master/src/rpcprotocol.h#L57" rel="nofollow">bitcoind source</a> I found error code 9 described as:</p>

<pre><code>RPC_CLIENT_NOT_CONNECTED = -9, // Bitcoin is not connected
</code></pre>

<p>About this I have 3 simple questions:</p>

<ol>
<li>First: what does this mean? I'm running the command on the same machine where the daemon is running, so no remote connection needed.</li>
<li>Secondly; how can this happen? Why does a stable running bitcoind daemon suddenly gets disconnected?</li>
<li>And most importantly; how can I prevent this from happening?</li>
</ol>

<p>All tips are welcome!</p>

CC BY-SA 3.0
2014-09-10T14:05:21.023Z
@GeorgeKimionis - Thank you for your answer. Do you mean that my Bitcoin daemon is not connected to any other nodes on the Bitcoin network anymore? I just checked and I am now connected to 87 other nodes. How can it be that the connection count dropped to 0? Is there any way to prevent this from happening? Force more connections if it drops below a certain threshold or something? All tips are welcome!
kramer65
<bitcoind><error><connection>
What does this mean? RPC_CLIENT_NOT_CONNECTED = -9, // Bitcoin is not connected
kramer65
# What does this mean? RPC_CLIENT_NOT_CONNECTED = -9, // Bitcoin is not connected

(Asked by: username_0 on 2014-09-09)

I'm building a service which does some automatic Bitcoin transactions and balance checking. In the system I now created some logging, which told me that my bitcoind daemon (running on Ubuntu 14.04 server) gave an error code -9 when running the following command `bitcoind getbalance`. In the [bitcoind source](https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/master/src/rpcprotocol.h#L57) I found error code 9 described as:

```
RPC_CLIENT_NOT_CONNECTED = -9, // Bitcoin is not connected

```

About this I have 3 simple questions:

1. First: what does this mean? I'm running the command on the same machine where the daemon is running, so no remote connection needed.
2. Secondly; how can this happen? Why does a stable running bitcoind daemon suddenly gets disconnected?
3. And most importantly; how can I prevent this from happening?

All tips are welcome!

**Tags:** bitcoind, error, connection

> **Comments:**
> **username_0**: @GeorgeKimionis - Thank you for your answer. Do you mean that my Bitcoin daemon is not connected to any other nodes on the Bitcoin network anymore? I just checked and I am now connected to 87 other nodes. How can it be that the connection count dropped to 0? Is there any way to prevent this from happening? Force more connections if it drops below a certain threshold or something? All tips are welcome!  

---

## 1 answers

### Answer by username_1 on 2014-10-22. Score: 2

> What does this mean? I'm running the command on the same machine where the daemon is running, so no remote connection needed.

It's not talking about the connection between your command line and the Bitcoin daemon, it's talking about the connection between your Bitcoin daemon and other Bitcoin daemons.

> How can this happen? Why does a stable running bitcoind daemon suddenly gets disconnected?

You might be running a very old version of Bitcoin that is incompatible with other clients. Your ISP might be filtering Bitcoin traffic. Your OS might be out of file descriptors. There are a huge number of possible reasons.

To narrow it down, have you tried looking at the debug.log of your Bitcoin client? You could also try looking at TCP traffic on port 8333 using Wireshark.


---

