Node is showing up as a Peer in Ethstats

Question

I am experimenting which Blockchains in a private environment.

I have created two nodes and they are showing up just fine in the ethstats page. One is local on my pc, the other one is also local but in a vm on my pc. I can see that they function well because at mining turned off they both ahve the same best block, and the blockminers are visible.

What is confusing me is that my node 2 is showing up as a peer and not as a separate node:

It is very clear that i am confusing the concept of nodes and peers. I have tried to look up existing questions which made me understand that a node can be a collection of peers. Am I understanding this well?

So how do i define a node and not a peer? Where is the distinction made? What should I do?

to create the so-called peer, I:

1. ran the genesis file
2. took the ip of the 1st node + enode
3. hooked them with the geth command
4. waited for import

5. started mining on both

     geth --networkid 46851 --port 30303  --rpc   --rpccorsdomain "*" --datadir "c:\\chain\\data-dir" --minerthreads 1 –bootnodes "enode://[email protected]:30303"
   

Answer 1

Peers and nodes are the same thing, from one another's perspective.

Every machine running geth is a node. When one node connects to another, they become peers of each other.

Ethstats can only show a node in the list if it is reporting its statistics to ethstats. Make sure you have passed the ethstats config to both the geth commands.

Even if a node is not reporting statistics to ethstats, it can still show it as a miner and peers, as long as any node connected to ethstats is receiving the mined blocks, and is using this other node as a peer.