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Show HN: Umbrel – A personal server OS for self-hosting

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Re: Show HN: Umbrel – A personal server OS for self-hosting

#71

Post by SLWW »

eightysixfour wrote: post #55

In the middle of building a self-hosting setup at home so I went ahead and installed this to give it a trial run. I generally like the interface and think it is a nice take on making self-hosting easier, but I have some pure stream of conscious criticism: 1. There sure are a lot of crypto apps. I'm not vehemently anti-crypto, but it is missing some "obvious" applications and full of those, so I'm curious what the pla…

With Tailscale, and the Tor accessibility you would think even a simple blog application as well as plex/Jellyfin would be default out the gate.

Right now my home theater setup could use something easier then what i kludged together over a weekend.

Re: Show HN: Umbrel – A personal server OS for self-hosting

#72

Post by kornhole »

apitman wrote: post #3

How does it compare to Sandstorm, yunohost, and Cloudron?

Yunohost.org is completely FOSS and a Debian based distro. It has no crypto apps. It is quite polished over many years including backup, lets encrypt, DNS, NGINX, fail2ban, diagnosis, and a nice web UI.

Re: Show HN: Umbrel – A personal server OS for self-hosting

#73

Post by jonstaab »

eightysixfour wrote: post #55

In the middle of building a self-hosting setup at home so I went ahead and installed this to give it a trial run. I generally like the interface and think it is a nice take on making self-hosting easier, but I have some pure stream of conscious criticism: 1. There sure are a lot of crypto apps. I'm not vehemently anti-crypto, but it is missing some "obvious" applications and full of those, so I'm curious what the pla…

It's accessible by tor because it's primarily a bitcoin/lightning node. If you're not interested in that core value prop, umbrel isn't for you.

Re: Show HN: Umbrel – A personal server OS for self-hosting

#74

Post by mayankchhabra »

eightysixfour wrote: post #55

In the middle of building a self-hosting setup at home so I went ahead and installed this to give it a trial run. I generally like the interface and think it is a nice take on making self-hosting easier, but I have some pure stream of conscious criticism: 1. There sure are a lot of crypto apps. I'm not vehemently anti-crypto, but it is missing some "obvious" applications and full of those, so I'm curious what the pla…

Thanks for the taking the time to try Umbrel out, great observations!

1. Re crypto apps, I figured some additional context may help. Before our today's release, Umbrel was a self-hosting OS primarily geared towards Bitcoin node users. Today, we migrated the Bitcoin node to the Umbrel App Store and took the last step in our transition to becoming an app-agnostic general purpose OS. So expect to see a lot more non-Bitcoin apps hereon!

2. Yes, agree. We'll have Plex and Jellyfin live in the app store soon.

3. The main issue we found with using a single domain on the local network is that many Android phones and PCS have flaky mDNS support, in which case name resolution for "*.local" would simply fail. This is why we decided to use ports. Perhaps we can look into using ports on the local network and domain on a VPS.

4. Good suggestion! Feel free to share your recommendations.

5. That's not possible using the UI, but you can create your own custom docker-compose app by following our app framework documentation: https://github.com/getumbrel/umbrel-apps/blob/master/README....

6. Until now, a common use case of our users has been remote connection between Umbrel and their Bitcoin wallets over Tor. This is why remote access was baked directly into Umbrel and turned-on by default.

However, as we've now evolved from the Bitcoin space, we'll prioritize offering the ability to disable remote Tor access functionality in the next update, and make it opt-in instead of opt-out.

Re: Show HN: Umbrel – A personal server OS for self-hosting

#75

Post by agentdrtran »

leodriesch wrote: post #49
agentdrtran wrote: post #41

How will this be different from previous services that tried this type of product and failed?

Just out of interest, could you list some?

I should have specified Sandstorm, there's apparently a reply from one of the leads of Sandstorm here I need to find.I also should have written "and competitors" like Yunohost and Cloudron but someone else also replied with that so hopefully someone gets some more info.

Re: Show HN: Umbrel – A personal server OS for self-hosting

#76

Post by pbronez »

eightysixfour wrote: post #55

In the middle of building a self-hosting setup at home so I went ahead and installed this to give it a trial run. I generally like the interface and think it is a nice take on making self-hosting easier, but I have some pure stream of conscious criticism: 1. There sure are a lot of crypto apps. I'm not vehemently anti-crypto, but it is missing some "obvious" applications and full of those, so I'm curious what the pla…

#5 is very interesting to me. I use (and paid for!) Unraid. It’s generally quite good. Their Community Apps plug-in scratches the same itch as the Umbrel App Store. I run several community-maintained of services with it, but it is… unclear… how to spin up your own image.

From what I can tell (and I might be dumb) you can’t really run a Docker image on Unraid unless you:

1) write an XML file using an undocumented schema

2) build and upload your image to Docker hub

3) get your container listed in community apps

Now I’m SURE it’s not actually that dumb. But I couldn’t figure it out before I got distracted, and thus I haven’t done it. All the “documentation” is exclusively forum threads. What little formal documentation exists is obsolete. It really feels like it’s set up for a core community of developers rather than the users.

Coming from that experience, I was impressed with a couple things about Umbrel as I read through OP:

(1) they have clear documentation on how to publish something to their App Store

(2) they have a documented YAML that handles most of the configuration

(3) they take an active role in curating the App Store. They claim to help you put together a nice listing.

(4) they have some actual tools to test your package

(5) the App Store has a concept of cross-app dependencies. They give the example of a blockchain explorer that needs a bitcoin node running. Very cool! I want to use this functionality to have one RDBMS, one git host, one logging service, etc all shared by the various apps I deploy.

Re: Show HN: Umbrel – A personal server OS for self-hosting

#77

Post by agentdrtran »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #42
kentonv wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see. Well, I hope you are able to succeed at that. For what it's worth, we initially focused on consumer use but weren't able to find a path to revenue there. Despite a lot of noise on HN, we had only a few hundred signups for our paid hosting service. We built super-scalable hosting tech but it turned out we could have hosted them on a single big VM all along... oops. I think the problem is that the apps, while fu…

To be fair, I think Umbrel has a very different consumer story: Since it has a much stronger crypto focus, it is targeting consumers much more likely to spend (crypto)money, I think, than the average consumer. And a key difference is that Cloudron and Umbrel may monetize selfhosters, which I believe Sandstorm did not endeavor to do at all.

Cloudron devs have said they're profitable the core team is salaried, but they have some larger nonprofit/NGO type customers.

Re: Show HN: Umbrel – A personal server OS for self-hosting

#78

Post by ocdtrekkie »

agentdrtran wrote: post #77
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, I think Umbrel has a very different consumer story: Since it has a much stronger crypto focus, it is targeting consumers much more likely to spend (crypto)money, I think, than the average consumer. And a key difference is that Cloudron and Umbrel may monetize selfhosters, which I believe Sandstorm did not endeavor to do at all.

Cloudron devs have said they're profitable the core team is salaried, but they have some larger nonprofit/NGO type customers.

Yeah that doesn't surprise me, you pretty much have to pay them regularly if using Cloudron, even as an individual, whereas nobody hosting their own Sandstorm server ever had to pay anything. Even when Cloudron was open source, updates weren't automatic unless you subscribed.

I think personal servers is pretty key, so I'm glad there are a few endeavors working on it.

Re: Show HN: Umbrel – A personal server OS for self-hosting

#79

Post by pbronez »

mayankchhabra wrote: post #74
eightysixfour wrote: post #55

In the middle of building a self-hosting setup at home so I went ahead and installed this to give it a trial run. I generally like the interface and think it is a nice take on making self-hosting easier, but I have some pure stream of conscious criticism: 1. There sure are a lot of crypto apps. I'm not vehemently anti-crypto, but it is missing some "obvious" applications and full of those, so I'm curious what the pla…

Thanks for the taking the time to try Umbrel out, great observations! 1. Re crypto apps, I figured some additional context may help. Before our today's release, Umbrel was a self-hosting OS primarily geared towards Bitcoin node users. Today, we migrated the Bitcoin node to the Umbrel App Store and took the last step in our transition to becoming an app-agnostic general purpose OS. So expect to see a lot more non-Bitc…

I’m pleased to see the support for deploying directly to your own Umbrel without going through the App Store / pull request process. This is one of my biggest frustrations with Unraid.

It would be nice to have first class support for deploying stuff this way - not just for testing. I would like to deploy custom containers / compositions on my Umbrel and see them alongside stuff installed from the official repository. Ok to require an external guy repo as upstream for this, but better to work entirely local.

Re: Show HN: Umbrel – A personal server OS for self-hosting

#80

Post by woojoo666 »

Hamuko wrote: post #29
woojoo666 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If self hosting were as easy and stable as signing up for a cloud service, I think people would switch

How do you suppose that would happen? You need some kind of hardware to self-host.

I didn't say cheap, though that would help of course. But people aren't opposed to buying hardware if the UX is worth it (see: Apple). And I do think it could be worth it if installing services was as easy as installing apps on your phone. No signup process, and data can be shared between services.

I'm imagining something like Synology NAS with it's apps [1], but with more user submitted services, and better connectivity between them. If Umbrel/Yunohost/Sandstorm/Cloudron released a pre-configured raspberry pi with some sane defaults, that could be a step in the right direction.

https://www.synology.com/en-us/dsm/packages

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