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Umbrel – Personal Cloud

umbrel.com

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Re: Umbrel – Personal Cloud

#91

Post by tibu »

colordrops wrote: post #84
pedrozieg wrote: post #12

A decade of “personal cloud box” attempts has shown that the hard part isn’t the hardware, it’s the long-term social contract. Synology/WD/My Cloud/etc all eventually hit the same wall: once the company pivots or dies, you’re left with a sealed brick that you don’t fully control, holding the most irreplaceable thing you own: your data. If you’re going to charge an Apple-like premium on commodity mini-PC hardware, you…

That's exactly my goal with HomeFree: https://homefree.host Goal is my mom running it, and keeping it 100% open source. It looks like there isn't a lot of visible progress, but there's now a branch with a live CD installer, and an admin UI, so no command line shenanigans are necessary. Once that is cleaned up, the website will be refreshed. I really need to quit my job so I can work on this full time.

What will make development sustainable? I mean it could take some time until it gets trackson and also usually open source works if there is a supporting company behind it.

Re: Umbrel – Personal Cloud

#92

Post by warkdarrior »

MegaSec wrote: post #82
bastawhiz wrote: post #64

I am uninterested in purchasing proprietary hardware running a proprietary operating system that'll work (maybe) for some amount of time. Sure, it's technically self hosted. But you can't extend it (without their proprietary app store). It doesn't seem like you can write your own apps without registering, or side load them. Details are extremely thin on the site, so let me know if I'm wrong. Hell, all the compelling…

There's a Github link for the os, but it is under some strange not-quite OSS or Free Software license... https://github.com/getumbrel/umbrel

Yes, it's one of those "do not compete with us" licenses.

Re: Umbrel – Personal Cloud

#93

Post by spankalee »

Esophagus4 wrote: post #89
spankalee wrote: post #49

I want a personal cloud, but one that can be hosted in an actual cloud. Ideally, I think we would something like Sandstorm but that can be deployed on everything from a home server to a Docker-based cloud service like Google Cloud Run or... Amazon Fargate (I'm not too familiar with their services). I don't use the cloud for scaling, but so that I never have to worry about power, internet, or machine-level security.

Just be aware that cloud providers like to end-of-life their managed service versions pretty quickly, so you should plan on doing maintenance work on your deployment every year or so if you decide to go that route.

This hasn't been the case for the Docker-based services like GCP Cloud Run. As long as you have a container that has an HTTP server on 0.0.0.0:8080 you're good. You can run anything you want in the container.

https://docs.cloud.google.com/run/docs/container-contract

Re: Umbrel – Personal Cloud

#94

Post by cryptonector »

All the concerns about umbrel being all proprietary are really about continuity and interoperability. We want a personal cloud where we can maintain continuity, and it needs to be, well, in some cloud that isn't your home, but also it needs to be replicated to your home (because again, continuity). Continuity in the face of:

- switching providers

- providers going bankrupt or being acquired by others who don't care

- account lockouts!

- switching device OSes

Open source means continuity and interoperability. Proprietary means the opposite.

Re: Umbrel – Personal Cloud

#96

Post by ffsm8 »

zdc1 wrote: post #87
no_wizard wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't forget the user experience needs to be seamless. We bubble ourselves to this as tech fluent folks on HN, but the seamless quality needs to be on par or better with Google Drive, iCloud drive, Google / iCloud Photos etc. Ability to share, good default security, and seamless integration with the things people care about. If this device can't automatically backup a phone wirelessly and without my interaction, it w…

I've tried a lot of personal cloud options (ownCloud, a Resilio Sync mesh, CloundMounter + B2) and somehow ended up back on iCloud because of this. My next experiment is just to use NFS over Nebula/Tailscale and see how much data I can just host off my NAS, but it's surprisingly been quite a journey for a simple problem.

You can't really switch away from iCloud without sacrificing it's deep integration.

The whole whole ecosystem is designed around it.

Don't get me wrong, Apple could've written their software with different upstream options, but they choose not to - hence going away from iCloud forces you to give up on a lot of features

I'm just pointing this out because if you've already attempted different options and went back to iCloud, then trying others isn't likely to be worthwhile, honestly.

You'd first have to accept that moving away from it means sacrificing features such as the photos sync (including delete etc).

Re: Umbrel – Personal Cloud

#97

Post by colordrops »

bix6 wrote: post #90
colordrops wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's exactly my goal with HomeFree: https://homefree.host Goal is my mom running it, and keeping it 100% open source. It looks like there isn't a lot of visible progress, but there's now a branch with a live CD installer, and an admin UI, so no command line shenanigans are necessary. Once that is cleaned up, the website will be refreshed. I really need to quit my job so I can work on this full time.

HomeFree must be deployed from another machine with Nix installed. Your mom runs Nix?

No, if you use the installer CD it's a fully UI based install. No command line. No awareness it's even running nix.

Administration is through a web UI.

It could easily be pre-installed on a device like a NUC and delivered to my mom.

Did you read the FAQ?

I've got all this running on a branch but it's still rough. Once it's relatively stable it will be merged to master and the home page completely revamped.

Re: Umbrel – Personal Cloud

#98

Post by colordrops »

tibu wrote: post #91
colordrops wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's exactly my goal with HomeFree: https://homefree.host Goal is my mom running it, and keeping it 100% open source. It looks like there isn't a lot of visible progress, but there's now a branch with a live CD installer, and an admin UI, so no command line shenanigans are necessary. Once that is cleaned up, the website will be refreshed. I really need to quit my job so I can work on this full time.

What will make development sustainable? I mean it could take some time until it gets trackson and also usually open source works if there is a supporting company behind it.

I am going to get it to a point where moderately technical people would be happy to use it over other options, and build a community that contributes. I will continue to work on making it easier to use over time.

Re: Umbrel – Personal Cloud

#99

Post by cess11 »

reachableceo wrote: post #69
catapart wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, isn't this running an open-source OS? The header has a link to a github with a non-commercial license[0]. If so, couldn't you just use the OS on non-premium-priced mini-PC hardware and never have to worry about them locking you out of your box? I guess maybe it's concerning if you're being forced to update by the OS? I've never actually run a system like that, but was considering umbrel OS (didn't actually kno…

I run umbrel in a VM . For non fiat finops stuff. I also run Cloudron on a VPS. I wish both of those solutions had more mindshare. They save me so much time and effort. Especially Cloudron!

I looked at Cloudron and I'm not sure why I would choose this over just throwing in Proxmox on a box and start clicking stuff in their 'app store'.

Re: Umbrel – Personal Cloud

#100

Post by crossroadsguy »

zdc1 wrote: post #87
no_wizard wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't forget the user experience needs to be seamless. We bubble ourselves to this as tech fluent folks on HN, but the seamless quality needs to be on par or better with Google Drive, iCloud drive, Google / iCloud Photos etc. Ability to share, good default security, and seamless integration with the things people care about. If this device can't automatically backup a phone wirelessly and without my interaction, it w…

I've tried a lot of personal cloud options (ownCloud, a Resilio Sync mesh, CloundMounter + B2) and somehow ended up back on iCloud because of this. My next experiment is just to use NFS over Nebula/Tailscale and see how much data I can just host off my NAS, but it's surprisingly been quite a journey for a simple problem.

That for me has been Dropbox. It's not even a shadow of what it used to be as a sleek, perfect sync tool, but the competition is so bad and getting worse every day (along with Dropbox) that "Dropbox + Cryptomator" is literally the best option I still have. Tresorit seemed to come close, but it's bug-ridden and really sluggish, and their support is painfully useless.

And as someone who has been in Apple's hardware ecosystem for more than a decade now (almost exclusively), I can't in my right mind bring myself to use any of its software/service products (and for good reasons, seeing it go bad to very bad to downright pathetic over the years) except for the OS because that's not really an option. Yes, I do have a small Cryptomator folder syncing to iCloud as well, but that's just because I wanted to have that as a backup sync, and it's a very tiny set of data that I anyway backup to elsewhere.

The bad of it? Yes, keeping everything under one roof really feels simple and easy.

The good? If Apple blocks my a/c today or nukes it, it will take a few hours to few days but I will get back everything single piece of data I have online on a new laptop or phone (Apple or Android or Windows or Linux) - everything! And it's a joy to use specific better/superior options for your software/service needs as per your specific choice!

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