How to remove old nodes and prevent to attempt conenction to those old nodes ?

Question

I have a testnet that has been running for several months. We have had several nodes from different locations connected. The blockchain has more than a millon blocks right now. Syncing a node from scratch is not working that well.

After enableing the -debug=net paramter I can see it is trying to connect to very very old nodes that do not exist any more or they had dynamic IPs. How to remove these IP's ?

2018-09-14 17:30:20 net: Trying to connect to xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx:xxxx
2018-09-14 17:30:20 net: trying connection xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx:xxxx lastseen=7365.4hrs
2018-09-14 17:30:25 net: connection to xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx:xxxx timeout
2018-09-14 17:30:25 net: Connection not established

I have way to many of these and the all have thounsands of hours of last seen...

Answer 1

You can manually add/remove nodes using the addnode JSON-RPC command (you need to pass the right value for the last parameter).

But this should not make much difference to the synchronization procedure. What do you mean by "is not working that well"?