document when the connection to the LNC proxy is initiated

[AndySchroder]

litd establishes connections to Lightning Node Connect terminal proxy servers to operate it's mailbox protocol. It's unclear when these connections are active.

This is a cool feature, but we should be able to turn it off without having to revoke macaroons and accounts associated with LNC. It's unclear when connections are made to the proxy servers, but I'm assuming litd keeps them open as long as there are some macaroons still associated with a LNC connection that happened at some time.

I am requesting the ability to turn off LNC in a command line/config option so that we can ensure that no connections to third party servers are ever in the works. We should still be able to use LND accounts feature and the macaroon baking features of litd without LNC making any other connections.

[AndySchroder]

I don't know how things are setup in the back end, but https://github.com/lightninglabs/lightning-terminal/issues/586 might be a workaround for this issue.

[guggero]

Just to clarify: A connection to the LNC proxy server is only initiated if there is an active LNC session. So as long as you don't create any sessions, no connection to the proxy should be established.

[AndySchroder]

Okay so is this how it works?

• no sessions
  • no connections to the proxy
• create a session but don't connect
  • litd connects to the proxy but disconnects after the pairing phrase has timed out
• create a session, connect before pairing phrase times out, then disconnect.
  • litd maintains a connection persistently even if the client disconnects until the session is destroyed.
• create a session, connect before pairing phrase times out, then destroy the session
  • litd maintains a persistent connection but when the session is destroyed then it doesn't connect again.

[guggero]

Yes, that's correct.

[AndySchroder]

Okay, that sounds good. I guess this feature isn't really needed now that I understand how it actually works. It might be useful to add this to your documentation somewhere, but that's up to you to decide.