UPDATE January 26, 2021 This is from Trey in the Presearch Nodes Telegram Channel
Hi everyone, I can confirm that there are some scenarios were the duplicate node error can occur where it is not the fault of the node operator. From debugging with people, I’ve thusfar found that since the last batch of updates that 3/4 of the time when people have encountered this error it has been due node operator error where they’ve either tried to run the node manually while the node was already running in the background or images the node with the public key and tried to launch it on another server.
That being said, about 1/4 of the time it has been a false error and has been an issue with the disconnect logic on the gateway. We’ve been working on some changes to automatically fix these cases, where the gateway will be able to “self-heal” in any scenario where connections are lost and not re-established. We’ll have these out soon (don’t have an ETA just yet), but in the meantime, I just wanted to acknowledge that it is possible for someone to receive this error still in certain failure cases due to no fault of their own.
Still a good idea, though, to try to debug to make sure you’re not trying to start the node again when it is already running (docker ps), just in case it is user error.
UPDATE from January 22, 2020
If you are getting this error here are some details from the Presearch Node Telegram Channel
“Duplicate Node: This node is already connected. Please stop the already running version before reconnecting.”
or
“Duplicate IP: This IP Address is already running another node. Only one node is permitted per IP Address.”
If it’s the duplicate IP address, then it means you have multiple nodes (with their own public keys) running from the same network. If it’s the duplicade node, then it means you’ve copied started multiple nodes with the same public key from EITHER the same computer or different computers.
For duplicate nodes:
If it’s from the same computer, then run
$ sudo docker ps
to see a list of all your docker containers and kill the duplicate with
$ sudo docker stop [container_name] && docker rm [container_name]
Note that the above scenario will never happen from the start command Presearch has provided, only if you’ve been messing around with container name settings on your end.
If it’s from multiple computers, this likely means you started a node, then took a snapshot of it (with the public key), and then started up another cloud server with the same public key, so you have two different servers trying to connect using the same identity (public key). If this is the case, you need to delete the public key from the duplicate server. Read how to do this HERE