A node is stuck in stopping / starting, or an action did nothing after a network blip

This page describes behavior that needs these two versions

Automatic compensation requires @sleep2agi/agent-node ≥ 2.5.0-preview.49 and @sleep2agi/commhub-server ≥ 0.9.0-preview.40.

Check yours with anet -v. On older versions the automatic recovery described below does not happen — see the last section instead.

Symptoms

After stopping / starting / deleting a daemon-managed node from the Dashboard or CLI:

• the node sits in stopping or starting and never moves on; or
• the action appears to do nothing at all — and neither side reports an error.

Typical trigger: the daemon happened to be offline at the moment the action was sent (daemon restart, machine sleep, network blip, the gap during an SSE reconnect).

First: wait for one reconnect

The hub delivers the request to the daemon as a one-shot push. If the daemon is offline at that moment, that push is gone — which is why this looks less like "the action failed" and more like "the action never happened".

On the versions above, this repairs itself: every time the daemon reconnects to the hub, it pulls back its own unfinished requests and replays them.

So the first step is to wait for that reconnect, not to restart anything by hand. Usually seconds to a minute. Nodes stuck in starting also have a 60-second backstop that clears the stale intermediate state so the action can be re-issued.

Confirming it actually recovered

Look at the log on the daemon's own machine — not the hub's, not the Dashboard's:

tail -f ~/daemon-<name>.log

After the reconnect you should see it pick up and run the request it missed, and the node leaves stopping / starting.

🔴 Do not treat the Dashboard state as the only criterion — the defining trait of this class of problem is that neither side reports an error and the UI looks fine.

Still stuck

In this order:

1. Confirm the daemon is really connected. See the daemon page: anet daemon list only reads local config — being listed there does not mean the hub knows about it. Look for the hub-side SSE ← / report_status heartbeat.
2. Confirm your versions (the two at the top of this page). Builds older than that have no reconnect-compensation path: stuck stays stuck, and that is the case where restarting the daemon by hand is actually the right move.
3. If it still will not move, open an issue with the daemon's local log for that period.