“Active” vs. “Connected” Peers?

Question

I was reading this thread: What do the 3 different peer numbers represent in Parity?

And I realized that I don't understand the difference between active and connected regarding peers.

I have a private network I'm playing with, and three Parity nodes. The readout on two of them is:

0/ 1/25

and the third:

0/ 2/25

I assume there is a firewall problem, but I also don't know how to get any of the 0s to be 1s or 2s.

Thank you.

Answer 1

Active versus connected is just a terminology question: Active means, they are actively synchronizing the chain, a 0 basically means you are already fully synchronized (or have no peers at all). Connected are all peers which you are listing to for new blocks and transactions, ideally this should be not 0.

You say, you have two nodes with 0/1/25 and one with 0/2/25, so your (virtual) peer-to-peer network looks like this:

[0/1/25] --- [0/2/25] --- [0/1/25]

So you have one node connected to the other two nodes, while they are not connected to a ring. Try to add all three enode addresses to a reserved peers file and pass this to all of your nodes:

--reserved-peers FILE          Provide a file containing enodes, one per line.
                               These nodes will always have a reserved slot on top
                               of the normal maximum peers. (default: None)