Different comportement when bootnodes are set in command line and in static-nodes.json

Question

I had a weird issue which was :

I have one bootnode:

bootnode -nodekey boot.key -verbosity 9 -addr :30310

Now I want to run my peers on the command line and I want them to add my bootnode as a peer to find each others, like that :

geth --datadir node1/ --syncmode 'full' --port 30311 --rpc --rpcaddr 'localhost' --rpcport 8501 --rpcapi 'personal,db,eth,net,web3,txpool,miner' --networkid 1996 --gasprice '1' -unlock '0xcf767e1258bf88520634311fc45e77f6b4cdd72a' --password node1/pass.txt --mine --bootnodes "enode://3879643f63c5257485c10f41b3604023b9de7f96267f741fbac2cb6992a4071ba45544e4055181191ef31ab7b996211a690edbc44ed64951bc4a2e7dae2199a5@127.0.0.1:30310"

This was working.

But was not working anymore when I was setting my bootnode in node1/static-nodes.json like that (as it is described in the documentation) :

[ "enode://3879643f63c5257485c10f41b3604023b9de7f96267f741fbac2cb6992a4071ba45544e4055181191ef31ab7b996211a690edbc44ed64951bc4a2e7dae2199a5@127.0.0.1:30310" ]

and using this command (which the same as above without the bootnode flag):

geth --datadir node1/ --syncmode 'full' --port 30311 --rpc --rpcaddr 'localhost' --rpcport 8501 --rpcapi 'personal,db,eth,net,web3,txpool,miner' --networkid 1996 --gasprice '1' -unlock '0xcf767e1258bf88520634311fc45e77f6b4cdd72a' --password node1/pass.txt --mine

After a lot of headache I solved my problem using sudo ntpdate -s time.nist.gov (which is also written in the documentation)

But does that mean that setting the bootnode on the file has a different action/meaning than setting it in the command line ? Why and is this an issue ?

Thanks,

Maxime

Answer 1

At least one difference between the two is that the --bootnodes argument sets explicitly the boot node addresses, whereas the static-nodes.json file sets the addresses of static full nodes (peers).