Weave Net

Starting, Stopping and Removing Peers

You may wish to weave stop and re-launch to change some config or to upgrade to a new version. Provided that the underlying protocol hasn’t changed, Weave Net picks up where it left off and learns from peers in the network which address ranges it was previously using.

If, however, you run weave reset this removes the peer from the network so if Weave Net is run again on that node it will start from scratch.

For failed peers, the weave rmpeer command can be invoked to permanently remove the ranges allocated to said peers. This allows other peers to allocate IPs in the ranges previously owned by the removed peers, and as such should be used with extreme caution: if the removed peers had transferred some range of IP addresses to other peers but this is not known to the whole network, or if some of them later rejoin the Weave network, the same IP address may be allocated twice.

Assume you had started the three peers in the overview example, and then host3 caught fire, you can go to one of the other hosts and run:

host1$ weave rmpeer host3
524288 IPs taken over from host3

Weave Net takes all the IP address ranges owned by host3 and transfers them to be owned by host1. The name “host3” is resolved via the ‘nickname’ feature of Weave Net, which defaults to the local host name. Alternatively, you can supply a peer name as shown in weave status.

Caution###

Do not invoke weave rmpeer for the same peer on more than one host.

The removed peer’s address range cannot be left dangling and is therefore reassigned to the peer on which weave rmpeer was run. Consequently, if you run weave rmpeer for the same peer on more than one host, the removed peer’s address range will be owned by multiple peers.

Once the peers detect this inconsistency, they log the error and drop the connection that supplied the inconsistent data. The rest of the peers will carry on with their view of the world, but the network will not function correctly. Depending on the timing of the rmpeer and the communication between peers, several peer cliques may form - groups of peers that are talking to each other, but repeatedly drop attempted connections with peers in other cliques.

See Also