What does this mean? RPC_CLIENT_NOT_CONNECTED = -9, // Bitcoin is not connected I'm building a service which does some automatic Bitcoin transactions and balance checking. In the system I now created some logging, which told me that my bitcoind daemon (running on Ubuntu 14.04 server) gave an error code -9 when running the following command bitcoind getbalance. In the bitcoind source I found error code 9 described as:

RPC_CLIENT_NOT_CONNECTED = -9, // Bitcoin is not connected


About this I have 3 simple questions:


First: what does this mean? I'm running the command on the same machine where the daemon is running, so no remote connection needed.
Secondly; how can this happen? Why does a stable running bitcoind daemon suddenly gets disconnected?
And most importantly; how can I prevent this from happening?


All tips are welcome!
What does this mean? I'm running the command on the same machine where the daemon is running, so no remote connection needed.


It's not talking about the connection between your command line and the Bitcoin daemon, it's talking about the connection between your Bitcoin daemon and other Bitcoin daemons.


  How can this happen? Why does a stable running bitcoind daemon suddenly gets disconnected?


You might be running a very old version of Bitcoin that is incompatible with other clients. Your ISP might be filtering Bitcoin traffic. Your OS might be out of file descriptors. There are a huge number of possible reasons.

To narrow it down, have you tried looking at the debug.log of your Bitcoin client? You could also try looking at TCP traffic on port 8333 using Wireshark.