Removing a peer/node

Question

I'm running on a private network at the moment, is there a way to remove a peer from your node without restarting Geth?

Answer 1

As per the documentation

Currently the console is lacking support for removing a peer, increasing peercount or adding a non-static peer but not to keep try reconnecting.

Answer 2

If you don't mind building Geth from source, there's currently an open PR to implement an admin.removePeer() command, which would allow you to remove a node from the static* node array:

• https://github.com/ethereum/go-ethereum/pull/2740

*It wouldn't allow you to remove nodes from the list of "bootstrap" nodes.

Answer 3

At this time, Geth 1.8.1-stable, is able to do it from the console, with the following command (already mentioned by Richard Horrocks):

admin.removePeer('<peer_id>')

Also, it is still not documented, but you can use it, without worries.