[SOLVED] bitcoin-qt "No block source available"

[Parazyd]

Hi.
I installed bitcoin-qt from the official Arch Linux repository and I can't seem to sync the blockchain.
I've been through all the basic stuff, added some fallback nodes... Nothing.
Port 8333 is open in my router and bitcoin-qt reports 12 active connections, but still says "No block source available."
Is there a workaround to this or will I have to use an alternative client?

Here's a screenshot:

[chrisvl]

You run it with tor ?

[Parazyd]

You run it with tor ?

No. Tried it with Tor as well, only got 6-7 "out" connections. Also tried with UPnP and without UPnP.

[chrisvl]

Retry it with tor and first change the port to 9150

[Parazyd]

Retry it with tor and first change the port to 9150

Did that already. Tried with 9050 when running standalone and with 9150 when running the tor-browser-bundle.

[shorena]

#1 use the torrent [1]

for the rest of the way use fast nodes, e.g. the ones from the list below.

launch with bitcoin-qt -connect=IP

from terminal. A single IP. You will have a single connection, but since you can only sync with one anyway it does not matter. Launch regularly when done sycning.

Code:

last updated 2014.10.10
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
IP               - location             - owner[1]-  speed      - info/stats page[2] - testnet
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
84.200.34.113    - Freinsheim, DE, EU   - Newar   - 1000 mbit/s - yes                - no
185.45.192.129   - Amsterdam, NL, EU    - anon    - 1000 mbit/s - /node.php[3]       - yes
213.165.91.169   - Germany, EU          - shorena -  100 mbit/s - yes                - no
50.7.68.180      - New York, USA        - Newar   -  100 mbit/s - yes                - no
5.9.24.81        - Germany, EU          - zvs     -  unknown    - no                 - no
178.79.173.71    - United Kingdom, EU   - zvs     -  unknown    - no                 - no
107.155.104.194  - Dalls, USA           - zvs     -  unknown    - no                 - no
106.185.32.195   - Japan, Asia          - zvs     -  unknown    - no                 - no
94.242.57.173    - Russia, Asia         - zvs     -  unknown    - no                 - no
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[1] refers to a bitcointalk.org username or anon if requested
[2] same IP, port 80 or path/port given
[3] work in progress

[1] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=145386.0

[Parazyd]

Thanks! I'll try it out and let you know.

[Parazyd]

...

It worked! Thanks so much!
I got the bootstrap torrent, moved it into .bitcoin/ and it synced up. Then I restarted it and connected to the first node in your list and now it's syncing

Seems like my bitcoin-qt didn't want to sync older blocks... Still not sure why though.

[shorena]

...

It worked! Thanks so much!
I got the bootstrap torrent, moved it into .bitcoin/ and it synced up. Then I restarted it and connected to the first node in your list and now it's syncing

Seems like my bitcoin-qt didn't want to sync older blocks... Still not sure why though.

Great.

Usually you have just bad luck with the first node. Its the only node you sync blocks with. If this connection is bad, the sync can take ages or even halt.

[whizz94]

I got a similar "No block source available" in bitcoin-qt 0.10.4.0 about two weeks ago and no amount of firewall fiddling, rebooting, reinstalling the -qt wallet nor running with the -reindex option got it to synch.

After reinstalling bitcoin-qt,
bitcoin-qt -reindex
still got nowhere, sticking at 4 years and 46 weeks behind

bitcoin-qt -datadir=anewdirectory
might be working, but this will download and process 53GB

I'm wondering whether something like a .lock file in /.bitcoin/ had been wrong?
What is the proper way to sort out a "No block source available" fault testing for bad .lock files or whatever it is before (not after) opening firewall ports and so on?

about the only good news is that I'm now running bitcoin-qt v0.11.0 and it might catch up in a few days.
at least the little double-arrow round thing in the lower right corner is indicating progress and mouse-hover over it shows a block number which goes up from time to time.

[achow101]

I got a similar "No block source available" in bitcoin-qt 0.10.4.0 about two weeks ago and no amount of firewall fiddling, rebooting, reinstalling the -qt wallet nor running with the -reindex option got it to synch.

After reinstalling bitcoin-qt,
bitcoin-qt -reindex
still got nowhere, sticking at 4 years and 46 weeks behind

bitcoin-qt -datadir=anewdirectory
might be working, but this will download and process 53GB

I'm wondering whether something like a .lock file in /.bitcoin/ had been wrong?
What is the proper way to sort out a "No block source available" fault testing for bad .lock files or whatever it is before (not after) opening firewall ports and so on?

about the only good news is that I'm now running bitcoin-qt v0.11.0 and it might catch up in a few days.
at least the little double-arrow round thing in the lower right corner is indicating progress and mouse-hover over it shows a block number which goes up from time to time.

No block source available indicates that you don't have a good connection to download blocks. reindex and the lock files don't matter to that. You want to connect to a good node.

[whizz94]

Not so, because for two weeks with 8 (and sometimes more) "out" connections, bitcoin-qt was showing "no block source available" and not downloading the recent blocks.
That is, I had good connections showing at the time of the "no block source available" and had not knowingly changed any settings on the router and firewall when it stopped getting new blocks.
This evening it was typically listing 11 or 12 good connections but not updating.

The kludge in progress is to restart from a blank new /.bitcoin/ directory and download the whole blockchain, which seems to be working.  This cannot be the proper way?

[achow101]

Not so, because for two weeks with 8 (and sometimes more) "out" connections, bitcoin-qt was showing "no block source available" and not downloading the recent blocks.
That is, I had good connections showing at the time of the "no block source available" and had not knowingly changed any settings on the router and firewall when it stopped getting new blocks.
This evening it was typically listing 11 or 12 good connections but not updating.

The kludge in progress is to restart from a blank new /.bitcoin/ directory and download the whole blockchain, which seems to be working.  This cannot be the proper way?

You want to check the debug window, it will give you more information. Specifically you should check the Peers tab and check each peer. Sometimes it will say you are connected to a peer when you really aren't. You will see that there might be no ping time or the times for the last send and last receive are really big, like several minutes. If you ever see a negative number there, then usually something is wrong  as well.

[ranochigo]

Not so, because for two weeks with 8 (and sometimes more) "out" connections, bitcoin-qt was showing "no block source available" and not downloading the recent blocks.
That is, I had good connections showing at the time of the "no block source available" and had not knowingly changed any settings on the router and firewall when it stopped getting new blocks.
This evening it was typically listing 11 or 12 good connections but not updating.

The kludge in progress is to restart from a blank new /.bitcoin/ directory and download the whole blockchain, which seems to be working.  This cannot be the proper way?

You want to check the debug window, it will give you more information. Specifically you should check the Peers tab and check each peer. Sometimes it will say you are connected to a peer when you really aren't. You will see that there might be no ping time or the times for the last send and last receive are really big, like several minutes. If you ever see a negative number there, then usually something is wrong  as well.

I setup several Bitcoin nodes previously and they all had these problems. The nodes connected didn't had any block height and I just closed it and ran Bitcoin Core with -reindex flag. Seems to work perfectly, all of them are up to date right now. One possibility is the client wasn't shut down correctly and database got corrupted.

[whizz94]

The kludge in progress is to restart from a blank new /.bitcoin/ directory and download the whole blockchain, which seems to be working.  This cannot be the proper way?

<<
You want to check the debug window, it will give you more information. Specifically you should check the Peers tab and check each peer. Sometimes it will say you are connected to a peer when you really aren't. You will see that there might be no ping time or the times for the last send and last receive are really big, like several minutes. If you ever see a negative number there, then usually something is wrong  as well.
>>
For the past four days, all peers show "blank" ping time, the bitcoin-qt 0.11.0C window says "1 year and 40 weeks" behind, but the new /.bitcoin/ directory continues to grow at about 0.5GB per hour.  The content of the new /.bitcoin/blocks/ as listed by a file manager in linux stops at blk00120.dat and rev00120.dat
Two days ago, it got to 9GB of RAM in use, but that is back down to 7GB now.
The size according to properties from the linux file manager of /.bitcoin/ continues to grow.  Is that correct?

[achow101]

For the past four days, all peers show "blank" ping time, the bitcoin-qt 0.11.0C window says "1 year and 40 weeks" behind, but the new /.bitcoin/ directory continues to grow at about 0.5GB per hour.  The content of the new /.bitcoin/blocks/ as listed by a file manager in linux stops at blk00120.dat and rev00120.dat
Two days ago, it got to 9GB of RAM in use, but that is back down to 7GB now.
The size according to properties from the linux file manager of /.bitcoin/ continues to grow.  Is that correct?

If the ping time is blank then you aren't actually connected to those peers. I'm not sure why the data directory would continue to grow though.

[ranochigo]

For the past four days, all peers show "blank" ping time, the bitcoin-qt 0.11.0C window says "1 year and 40 weeks" behind, but the new /.bitcoin/ directory continues to grow at about 0.5GB per hour.  The content of the new /.bitcoin/blocks/ as listed by a file manager in linux stops at blk00120.dat and rev00120.dat
Two days ago, it got to 9GB of RAM in use, but that is back down to 7GB now.
The size according to properties from the linux file manager of /.bitcoin/ continues to grow.  Is that correct?

If the ping time is blank then you aren't actually connected to those peers. I'm not sure why the data directory would continue to grow though.

That was exactly the problem I faced. The blockchain continued to synchronize, bitnodes won't connect. I made sure that I shut down correctly each time but it never worked. I just ran reindex and let it fully synchronize. The log file didn't have anything strange either.

[whizz94]

One possibility is the client wasn't shut down correctly and database got corrupted.

That is plausible.  Today it crashed out unexpectedly with an error message before it had -resynch the first 20GB of blockchain and this afternoon, on the third try, it was still nowhere near through resynch  
Then doing the bitcoin-qt [file][exit] got even more error messages.  So I'll try restarting it tomorrow with the -rsynch option and see what it does.

By the way, it was going wrong a couple of days ago when I posted.  If anyone had posted in the form "present /blockchain/ directory or /.bitcoin/ directory size = " then I'd have seen what I needed to know to restart it when my /.bitcoin/ got bigger than 60GB.  It stuck showing 1 year and 40 weeks behind and no new 00nnnblk.dat files arriving despite subtantial network activity of many tens of GB received.


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