Introduction behavior

I’ve been tinkering with the “introducer” feature and I’m having some trouble either getting it to work or understanding it. Or maybe both.

I have four nodes, A through D. A is configured to connect to B and C, and vice versa.

If I add A to D and set it as an introducer there, then add D to A, I expect D to automatically get nodes B and C added. It does not, no matter how many times I restart A or D.

I have had introduction work before on different nodes but it took several minutes to propagate the devices. Some devices still haven’t propagated.

You have to share folder between A and D.

See explanation here:

There is a (different) shared folder between A <-> B and A <-> D. And yet, B doesn’t appear in D’s device list. Or do they have to be sharing the same folder?

Yes, same folder must be shared A <-> D and A <-> B for B appeared in D device list.

EDIT: For more detailed info see [v0.9.18] Introducer Nodes

I see. If that’s the case then the UI description should really be changed.

Any devices configured on an introducer device will be added to this device as well.

This text implies a totally different behavior.

Yeah, the text is suboptimal. The behavior is good though, as you don’t want to tell other devices about every device you know of, only those they have a need to know about.

I was actually hoping for this “undesired” behavior. I was hoping to have kind of a master node that knows about every other node in my personal cluster, whether or not it in particular has anything to share with them, so that I can add a new node on that one and have it immediately available to all of the others to share with.

Perhaps there could be two introduction settings? “Introduce me to nodes sharing the same data” (current behavior) vs. “introduce me to all nodes you know of?”

EDIT: Moving to feature subforum since it’s more appropriate there.

Or you could just have a noop folder which everyone shares in master mode.

That would be a workaround but it still seems unintuitive to me. At least if we correct the UI text, the workaround would be a bit more obvious.

Agree. This should probably have an issue on github.

Done