My Start9 is work in progress.
Everybody raves about it, so I believe I am unique, but, for me, it is missing some critical components and the UI is difficult to navigate.
For one I need a VPN like Tailscale. Tor is just awful to use and I am mostly remote from my nodes, so Umbrel tailscale is critical for my use, both from an admin perspective, but also from a remote spend perspective: Tailscale, + Zeus to access my node.
I understand a new Start9 OS is on it's way with much better UI and a VPN, but I've been waiting for well over a year for it.
oh yeh.... I actually don't know much about vpn and tor. You are probably making a good choice by sticking with umbrel tailscale
You can still use Lightning Terminal... It's not as fast as Tailscale but it'll do the job
So I run 3 nodes:
An upgraded Umbrel Home with the Bitcoin Core and Lightning Node, this is a full node and has several channels and if I keep it balanced, which I don’t bother to do now, could earn routing fees. I also run a full Liquid blockchain for any L-BTC or L-USDT that I have.
An upgraded RPi 5 8GB RAM with 2TB SSD, this was a full node, but Lightning crashed several times and I lost 0.2 BTC in channels due to not backing up sufficiently. I don’t trust this to hold liquidity, but I do run it for other tasks, such as running the Monero blockchain and experimenting with password managers, BitTorrent clients, server monitoring and password managers.
Start9 node running on a Lenovo NUC with 32GB RAM & a 2TB SSD. This is currently powered down because of this:
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When I first setup my 2 Umbrel nodes, originally RPIs with 4GB + 2 TB SSD & 8GB + 1TB SSD respectively, I used the Lightning node itself to open channels using https://amboss.space/ and https://lightningnetwork.plus/ to find suitable nodes.
This was easy and cheap at the time. I remember setting up several triangle nodes to small capacity nodes on my first Umbrel and several large capacity channels to large public nodes on my second Umbrel. I also setup large channels between my own two nodes so I could route payments across my own network. I was experimenting heavily.
To rebalance, I installed RTL, Ride the Lightning and Thunderhub, but quickly realised that RTL was the tool for me. I also installed an auto rebalancing tool called LNDg, which I spent many months watching YouTube videos and reading articles in a failed attempt to master.
Umbrel doesn't mount external hard drives for some reason.
My Umbrel home mounted my RPI SSD drive to migrate across successfully.
But I haven't tried adding additional storage to date.
It'll only install to one hard drive and then it will not recognize any others.
You can program your routing and balancing yourself with lnd-rest - it's easy python 😁
Good old triangle swaps. Good times.
Things were better before the war 😂
Lndg is great. Set it to rebalance at 70% of Channel fee and let it fly.
It has a nasty anti pattern though:
Your channel liquidity gets drained instantly at a low fee. So you rush in and raise the fee.. And lndg quickly rebalances at that higher fee 😂
Have you upgraded to umbrel 1.x?
Home comes with it.
Currently 1.2.2