Lightning-sentinel

Description:

• A telegram bot written in rust that will monitor a lighting node over tor. It does this through calling the node's REST API and sending notifications to a telegram private channel with the node administrator

Privacy information and reason for this bot:

• The need to build this came after trying out the lightning-watch telegram bot and being frusted that in it's ideal state it requires the user to lock up funds in a channel with it. Maybe this was a lot of effort to get around that problem, but we shall see.
• As the source code shows, the only data stored on a connected node is it's RESTFUL API url over tor and the provided macaroon. This means the bot has no idea about the IP of the nodes it's talking with. If anyone looking over this code has suggestions on increasing privacy of users, please reach out.

NOTE: CURRENTLY ONLY SUPPORTS LND, BUT THERE ARE PLANS TO SUPPORT OTHER IMPLEMENTATIONS AS WELL IF PEOPLE FIND THIS USEFULL

To Use Existing Telegram Monitoring Bot:

Requirements:

• Have an LND lightning node setup
• Have a REST API running on the same machine as the node that understand the "/getInfo" url & is hosted on tor
  • If you are running raspiblitz, one comes out of the box & this is what was used during development of this tool
  • If you have another lnd node implementation, take a look at these options (NOTE: YOU NEED AN ONION ADDRESS FOR THE REST API TO USE THIS TOOL!):
    • https://www.lightningnode.info/technicals/lightning.connect

How to use:

• Create a private chat with the telegram bot @t.me/llightning_sentinel and send \help
• Create macaroon on your lightning node command line: lncli bakemacaroon uri:/lnrpc.Lightning/GetInfo
• Respond to the Bot's \start command with the tuple (<lightning_node_tor_address>,<macaroon>), ex:

  (https://wkdirllfgoofflfXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXJJJJJJJJJJJJ.onion:8080, XXXXXXXXXXX...)

To Host Your Own Telegram Monitoring Bot:

Requirements

• Have a remote server setup with ubuntu 20.04, compile/build from source using cargo or install from the release binary
• Create a new bot with telegram, following these instructions to create a new bot with botfather
  • https://medium.com/shibinco/create-a-telegram-bot-using-botfather-and-get-the-api-token-900ba00e0f39

How to run:

• To run this on ubuntu 20.04, make sure you have the CC linker installed by running:
  • sudo apt install build-essential
  • sudo apt-get install libssl-dev pkg-config autoconf
• Create a Settings.toml file from the Settings.default.toml at the root of the machine
• Add your telegram bot ID recieved from botfather

• Then set the binary up as a service using the following configuration in a file name lightning-sentinel.service: ` [Unit] Description=Telegram Bot monitoring lightning nodes After=network.target StartLimitIntervalSec=0

  [Service]
  Type=simple
  Restart=always
  RestartSec=1
  User=root
  ExecStart=/root/lightning-sentinel/target/debug/lightning-sentinel
  
  [Install]
  WantedBy=multi-user.target
  

  `

• Place this in /etc/systemd/system, then run systemctl start lightning-sentinel

• Proceed to register with the bot the same way as if you were using the existing bot

  *NOTE: DO NOT HAVE THIS RUNNING ON THE SAME POWER SOURCE AS WHERE YOUR NODE IS RUNNING (WOULD DEFEATE THE PURPOSE OF THE BOT) *