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 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 
 You can program your routing and balancing yourself with lnd-rest - it's easy python 😁