How to recover BTC "Trans rejected ... Non-canonical signature: High S Value"

[stlem85]

Hi everybody,

probably will ask for very dumb question, but couldn't find solution. Here is problem description:
- In one of legacy servers we weer running Bicoin core server v0.8.5 Linux 64b (under CentOS).
- Everything worked fine, until several days ago random outgoing transaction, which were sent from this server wasn't actually confirmed and while checking them with blockchain.info well known error was displayed "Transaction rejected by our node. Reason: Non-canonical signature: High S Value"
- We did some research, that the problem might be caused due to obsolete Bitcoin core version.
- We stopped current, upgraded it to Bitcoin v0.12.1. Actually downloaded latest version and run it setting same data dir. Everything seems to be fine now.

The MAIN question is how to recover transactions which were rejected? To make BTC appear back to the wallet.

Like rescan or reindex, or may be there is other way to achieve BTC back in 0.12.1 version?

p.s. We tried to run bitcoin-cli with rescan/reindex parameters, but same way which worked on older Bitcoin core version, currently doesn't work. System displays "Method not found" error. It seems that 12 version has different approach for these purposes. We're using command line only client (in headless Linux environment).

[achow101]

Just restart bitcoind with the -zapwallettxes argument. This removes all of the transactions from the wallet and rescans from the beginning so that it will remove the unconfirmed transactions. You should then be able to respend those Bitcoin.

[stlem85]

Thank you for advise. Could you please clarify how to run this command in 0.12.1 version?

Cause currently we tried the following:
./bitcoin-cli zapwallettxes
error code: -32601
error message: Method not found


./bitcoind zapwallettxes
# Error: There is no RPC client functionality in bitcoind anymore. Use the bitcoin-cli utility instead.

[achow101]

Code:

./bitcoind -zapwallettxes

Make sure that bitcoind is shut down when you run this. It will start bitcoind.

[stlem85]

Thank you for clarification. We did it and right now process is in progress. We assume that it could take a while any experience how many hrs?

Taking into account that server is pretty fast (like 4 CPUs) and WAN channel is about 100Mbit.


p.s. In any case we'll report the results here. It might help other users...

[achow101]

Thank you for clarification. We did it and right now process is in progress. We assume that it could take a while any experience how many hrs?

Taking into account that server is pretty fast (like 4 CPUs) and WAN channel is about 100Mbit.


p.s. In any case we'll report the results here. It might help other users...

It has to rescan the blockchain, which can take a while. Honestly, I have no estimates as I haven't had to do a rescan in a while. It shouldn't take more than a few hours to complete. Once it is done, the bitcoind will be used normally. There is no need to restart the program and it shouldn't stop itself.

[stlem85]

Thank you! Issue is solved.

As promised making report here:

1. Process took less than 3hrs.

2. Rejected transactions were returned back.

3. After completing reindex process Bitcoind server continue to work fine for RPC calls so actually no need to start it. Just to be sure, we made stop/start routine.