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With the death of some old hardware I was using to run one of my nodes plus a few other bits and pieces, I've decided I'd quite like to simplify my always-on home hardware down to a single device.

With that in mind, I'm looking for both hardware and software recommendations for a standalone device capable of running the usual Bitcoin and Lightning nodes, but in addition to that, an Electrum server, an instance of mempool.space, a coinjoin server (be that JoinMarket or Samourai Dojo), and Bisq. I'd also like to potentially use this device to run a variety of non-bitcoin software, such as Pi-hole, personalized cloud storage, potentially a home media server, that sort of thing. Having looked in to it a bit, it seems that Umbrel might be the most straightforward way to do all this, and can run everything I've listed above except Bisq (although an app appears to be in the works).

My first question is whether anyone who has experience with this kind of thing would disagree about using Umbrel and would suggest just running something like Debian (or any other Linux distro)?

My second question is whether anyone could suggest some hardware which would be most appropriate for this. My main considerations are low power usage and being powerful enough to run everything I've listed above. I had originally looked at a Raspberry Pi 4, but I have some concerns about whether it could handle everything listed. At the moment I'm sort of considering the Orange Pi 5. I don't actually need it to be a single board computer at all - I'm just looking for energy efficiency with good enough hardware.

Yes, you can do everything like that on Umbrel on a RPi4. I am doing it now.

IMO, you are better off getting something like this. [Not that actual one but a micro PC along those lines]

https://www.amazon.com/Beelink-SEI10-i3-10110U-Computer-Performance/dp/B0BPBWTCQX?ref_=ast_sto_dp&th=1

Running Debain along with mirrored drives. IF you are running your own LN node you don't want to have to deal with the recovery and everything else if 1 of the drives dies.
Yes, I am running with no raid, BUT I know the risks and the cost of a 2nd drive is more then I have in my LN node so.....

Not to mention, as software gets more bloaty the faster machine will just keep up better.

AND it's got more power (not computing power just raw electrical power) so if you do want to plug in a bunch of USB devices for some reason you are not going to be getting the under volt warnings.

If you want it to just work, Umbrel is nice in the fact that it just works.


-Dave

My usual answer would be: "get a laptop with low power CPU" (and 16 GB RAM), but after checking the Orange Pi 5 specs, that's consumes even less power. I just checked my spare laptop: it uses 8W while "being on" with the screen on the lowest brightness. That includes it's SSD, and it would be a tad less less with the screen off. I like laptops because they're cheap and come with build-in UPS. For your purpose, it would either need a large SSD, or hook up a cheap USB HDD and move the large data there.

Unfortunately, I can't advice you on most of the software questions, as I only have experience with Bitcoin Core.

Pi 4 or Pi 4 Model B? Are you running a variety of things at once on it? Given I want to simplify everything on to one device, I'm looking at running all the bitcoin apps I mentioned as well as potentially streaming media to multiple devices simultaneously. Can your Raspberry Pi handle all that?

I'd be happy to use something like that rather than a SBC, but a quick search seems the power draw on such devices will be anywhere between 5-10x more than a SBC. As I say, I'm looking for something with as little power draw as possible (for potential off grid use) while still being able to handle everything I've listed above, so I'd probably only buy a more power hungry device like that if it was absolutely necessary.

Good thinking. I already run RAID on my main storage, and I have some spare drives I could use to RAID everything except the blockchain itself.

I wouldn't plan on ever doing this. I really just want something I can set up and forget about.

Yeah, it seems an Orange Pi 5 at idle will consume <2W. If I was to use a laptop, I'd probably just disconnect the screen and any other hardware I don't need to reduce the power draw, though.

No need to disconnect it, just set it up to turn off the screen when you close it. Mine is set up to suspend when closed, that's why I couldn't easily test it.

Use Debian yes. That is the perfect distro to use when you don't want any moving (and broken) parts.  You'd be interested in Debian testing in particular, so you aren't locked out of dependencies for running newer software. Or you can go with Slackware which is also good but has got less prebuilt packages.

Hardware, you'll definitely need at least 16G for running all that, so that definitely rules out the Pi. Definitely don't use an Umbrel either (unless it can meet the RAM and storage requirements), especially if you want to run a bunch of custom stuff.

I have a RPi 4 with 8GB RAM running core, lnd, electrs, joinmarket yg, and btc-rpc-explorer. It runs a little warm and sometimes it is slow. I'm not sure it can handle much more than that, but I would love to hear from others who have tested its limits.

Have you checked it's current resource consumption? I like gnome-system-monitor for a quick overview: if CPU and RAM aren't maxed out, it can probably handle more.

How about Intel NUC Kit (NUC Kit means you buy and place your own RAM and HDD/SDD and)? If you choose NUC Kit with low-watt CPU (15W TDP), disable turbo boost, slightly undervolt/clock the CPU and choose energy efficiency RAM and HDD/SSD, i expect it could use 20W or less during high load. As bonus, you don't need to worry about finding software which run on ARM CPU.


Also check average I/O usage with tools such as iotop.

How about purchase a second hand Apple Mac Mini i7? Looking at ebay I've found a deal[1] on a UK seller - for ~420 € + Shipping - that has the following specs:
From my limited tech knowledge, it seems that this machine would be more than suitable to run the previous mentioned setup and still be able to have room to grow. For 420 €, however, I'm not sure if you'll be able to find a similar machine brand new though. Perhaps browse the second market areas of your country to see if a better deal comes up?

As far as software goes, have you considered perhaps running Unraid[2]? It has some community apps focused on cryptocurrency[3] and for the ones that you can't find in the store, I suppose you could install them on a Docket container?

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[1]https://www.ebay.com/itm/255950234328 (https://www.ebay.com/itm/255950234328)
[2]https://unraid.net/ (https://unraid.net/)
[3]https://unraid.net/community/apps/c/crypto#r (https://unraid.net/community/apps/c/crypto#r)

None of of streaming / sharing apps since I don't believe in running anything not BTC related on a device holding funds. But outside of that, yes I am running 2 explorers, electrum server, all the LN things and btcpay with no issues. It's s 4b.


You would have to tweak umbrel to use the drives that are not attached to the RPi, and then you still have to have the LN stuff raided too.

No argument that it's going to need a lot more power then an SBC but everything like this is going to be a bit of a tradeoff.
Need more RAM for something with an SBC there is nothing you can do, with one of these micro PCs just buy another stick.

There is also a bit of time = money involved. The micro PCs are going to be faster to handle certain things just due to raw speed and power.
Don't get me wrong I love the SBC nodes: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5364113   I just have found at times their limitations to be a bit annoying.
-Dave

Yeah, that's mainly why I was looking at Orange Pi, which has 16 GB and 32 GB models.

What do you mean by "an Umbrel"? Umbrel is software which can run on any device. I've not used it before but on reading about it seems like it would be perfect for my use case.

This is very useful, thank you. As I suspected, a Raspberry Pi would struggle to handle the additional non-bitcoin stuff I'm looking to run on it as well. What OS are you using on your Pi?

Not a bad idea at all. I'll look in to it a bit more.

True, but I figured an Orange Pi 5 with 16 GB (or even 32 GB) would be capable of running what I've listed above. But maybe I will go down the micro PC route...

Be careful with some of the NUCs
There are some running stripped down low power processors in order to save power (and make then cheaper to build) but they are painfully slow in terms of performance.

Once again, from the I don't know where you are in the world but around here you can get an 11th gen i5 nuc sized unit for under $400 just add RAM and drive. BUT to get it with RAM 16GB + Drive 512GB + Windows (whatever) is only $450......


https://www.amazon.com/NUC11PAHi5-Computer-Theater-Barebone%EF%BC%8CIntel-i5-1135G7/dp/B09MZ4V53Q

vs

https://www.amazon.com/NUC11PAHi5-Panther-i5-1135G7-Graphics-Kingston/dp/B09N1HXPQT

Once you are out of the US Amazon world it's a different story.

You can always use the drive for something else.

-Dave

Good suggestion. I installed nmon.


I am running Raspian Lite 64-bit.

nmon shows that most of the time it sits idle, but occasionally all 4 cores are maxed for a short period of time. I presume that is when a new block is received. RAM usage sits at about 99% and never reaches 100% (which seems suspicious).

Becaus the CPU is maxing out only occasionally and because RAM is nearly at max, it seems to me that additional constant usage, such a media server, might become a problem, but additional intermittent usage would not.

Also, it seems to me that a monitor, keyboard, and mouse will be more convenient as you add services. So, maybe a cheap laptop would be an option.

Is that including cache? If it is, it's normal: RAM is supposed to be used. If it's really used by all running programs, you need more RAM.
To check:
The amount under "used" is what matters, and the amount under "available" is what's available while ignoring file cache.

Depending on what consumes the CPU, you can play with the niceness or even limit the number of cores a certain application can use to give for instance a media server a higher priority.

Hmm, decisions! I'm still tempted by the Orange Pi, but perhaps I'll see if I can pick up a second hand laptop on the cheap first (or even better, see if a friend has one they aren't using they could lend me for a while). I'll get it all set up and running everything I want, and see how it handles it and what the power usage is, and then decide if I want to keep that set up long term or if I want to commit to purchasing an Orange Pi.

Given that I'm using a laptop and not a SBC at the moment, I'll probably just use Debian or Ubuntu since I'm familiar with them and I know I can get everything I want running on them without issue. I'll maybe experiment with Umbrel in the future.

Starting with *I* use laptops for some crypro & node work.
Many of them do not like being run 24/7/365 the CPU fans are smaller, they in general have less cooling and so on.
Not saying that they can't do it, just that it's not optimal. NUCs although smaller tend to be designed around 24/7 operation.

And, if you are going laptop look at the more business / desktop replacement side then the consumer side. I do find that they are a bit better.

-Dave

Although all true, I've done it for years :) Nowadays I don't keep my laptop on 24/7 anymore, but I used to. The "trick" is to get one that doesn't consume too much power, and clean the dust out of the fan on a regular basis. I'm also on my second fan now, and I have a third in stock.

I don't have much to recommend, I use Raspibolt (https://raspibolt.org/). It provides what you want, and it's a good exercise if you're familiar with Linux. Don't run LND if you get a Raspberry Pi. Rather, go with c-lightning as it's more lightweight.

If I were you, I'd probably listen to LoyceV and buy a new computer and avoid RPi altogether. Especially if I'll be running a reliable lightning node, the last thing that I want is from lightning daemon to stop frequently due to resource limits. At the moment, in my Raspibolt setup, I periodically notice Bitcoin daemon stopping. Probably CPU hits the ceiling.

BTW, I have RPi 4 with 4 GB of RAM.

I'd build a modular system consisting of a processing unit (Rasberry, Intel NUC, laptop or whatever) and a NAS or SAN containing several drives. Pros: easy to upgrade just the processing part, RAID backup, space for more drives available (compared to small enclosures with just 1 nvme or ssd drive), more scalable etc.

Now I got it. The reason it never exceeds 100% and no swap is used is that actual usage is only about 4 GB and the rest is just buffer/cache.

My bad, I thought it the name of some box that some company was selling that came prepackage with that software.

Hey hi o_e_l_e_o  I'm actually answering you because I ran both Umbrel and Embassy on a raspberry pi4 but with poor results, in the sense that the Rasp as consumed remains very low but the software is a bit buggy but the risk is actually the raspberry same if there are sudden changes in voltage and it suddenly switches off, because it happened to me that the SD card gets corrupted easily and in all probability this happens due to the various presence of bugs in the os itself. I can't confirm it with certainty but since I installed raspian pi os lite I can say that I haven't had any other similar cases and I am currently running a bitcoin core on the main operating system while inside docker nextcloud, pihole, plex media server and I could continue to install many other applications in docker.

So to answer your question I advise you not to use plug and play systems but to have more control with a debian os and to take a single card for the performance/consumption ratio. There would also be the zima board
https://www.zimaboard.com/

I've recently created a thread[1] where I was hoping to document my developments in having a node running in unraidOS but after some feedback from the community I'm considering ditching the idea and have a dedicated machine for this sole purpose (exactly like yours, except the media server part, cloud serve and pi-hole). In that regard I have two questions:

• Did you eventually decided on which machine to use? I've seen prices of Orange Pi 5 around 200 €, but I was wondering if you ended up going with that route or ended up using an old laptop;
• You mentioned using Umbrel. Have you seen this recent debate about it[2]?

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[1]https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5459995.0 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5459995.0)
[2]https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5356129.msg62584204#msg62584204 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5356129.msg62584204#msg62584204)

I ended up sticking with what I know as I mentioned in this post (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5447949.msg62066755#msg62066755) because my list of things to try out is growing ever longer, so I scrubbed Umbrel from that list for now. I'm just using a second hand laptop I bought for cheap from a friend, and I'm only running bitcoin related stuff on it, and not the media server or any of the other non-bitcoin stuff I mentioned in my first post in this thread. That's also on my to do list, haha. It's running Debian.

I had not, but that means Umbrel is unlikely to get back on my to do list any time soon.

Thank you for the quick reply. As of now I'm debating in grabbing either a NUC featuring an i5 (8GB but 16GB would be ideal) or an apple mac mini (from 2012?) that would allow me to run the same batch of programs that you also planned in doing (if I don't end up going with the unraid route, which may happen).

I run Umbrel on RPI4 model B with 8GB RAM.

I have a 2TB SSD.

I use the FLIRC case for my RPI, maintaining the temperature around 55 celcius degrees.

However, I am literally in love with this channel: https://www.youtube.com/@402PaymentRequired. It gives perfect instructions on how to run all the features you want from scratch. Fun fact, if you are a nerd like me, is that the content creator uses their terminal only  :P I have no relation to the owner of the channel, but whoever they are, I love them.