Can I temporarily blacklist routes in the same way that `lightning-cli pay` does?

[billygarrison]

Issue and Steps to Reproduce

Maybe someone has other advice. I've been trying to get manual routes working, and have been somewhat successful. Unfortunately, most of my sendpay commands end up returning an error WIRE_TEMPORARY_CHANNEL_FAILURE.

Questions

• Is it normal to get so many WIRE_TEMPORARY_CHANNEL_FAILURE errors? What does this mean?
• To create a circular route, I first use getroute where fromid and id are nodes other than my own. If this ends up returning WIRE_TEMPORARY_CHANNEL_FAILURE, is there a way I can temporarily blacklist the route from fromid to id so that when I do getroute again, it returns a different route?
• The WIRE_TEMPORARY_CHANNEL_FAILURE error doesn't seem to resolve right away - resending the same route 30 seconds later doesn't fix it. If I get this error, should I just try to create a route that avoids that node?

getinfo output

{
  "id": "02843833374b6c42daa4b780df2066a9985cb8cf97bc4566dd63cf693d32cbf7b5",
  "alias": "BillyGarrison",
  "color": "009900",
  "num_peers": 16,
  "num_pending_channels": 0,
  "num_active_channels": 15,
  "num_inactive_channels": 1,
  "address": [
    {
      "type": "ipv4",
      "address": "47.55.123.202",
      "port": 9735
    }
  ],
  "binding": [
  ],
  "version": "v0.6.3",
  "blockheight": 565119,
  "network": "bitcoin",
  "msatoshi_fees_collected": 6315
}

[rustyrussell]

Yes! Call getroute using the 'excludes' parameter. See the documentation... um, ok, let me update the doxumentation...

[rustyrussell]

But to answer your question: yes, it's common. We only know the theoretical capacity of channels, not their current capacity (which side hold how much of the total balance). So expect failures.

In fact, this is exactly what the pay plugin does: get routes, try, exclude failing channels, retry. If you can't get a route, it can't be done.

[billygarrison]

Great! Thanks a lot @rustyrussell !