What happens when the master node goes down?

Question

Say I have 1 master and 2 slave nodes. What happens if the master node goes down? Is the chain dead? Or can I simply assign the correct permissions to one of the slave nodes and make it the new master?

Answer 1

As a matter of design, there is no "master node" in a MultiChain blockchain. If you're talking about the node which set up the chain, then if you never gave high-level permissions like admin or mine to addresses belonging to any other nodes, then the master node failing will indeed mean that no more blocks can be created, and no new permissions can be set. So you should ensure that administration and mining control is spread across multiple nodes, to prevent this being a problem.

Comments

If this occurs--if the original/master/genesis node goes down, can transactions still be carried out?

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Yes, of course, the original/master/genesis node has no special status.

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What would happen to addresses/keys stored on that node? Can that be recovered?

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Private keys stored on a node are lost if that node's disk storage is destroyed. But you have many options for backing up and redundancy. Please see:

https://www.multichain.com/developers/backing-up-restoring-nodes/
https://www.multichain.com/developers/clustering-high-availability/