mayankchhabra

Hey HN, I’m one of the founders of Umbrel.

We’ve spent the last 5 years building umbrelOS to make self-hosting accessible. Yesterday, we launched our dream hardware: Umbrel Pro.

Specs: - 4x NVMe SSD slots for storage (tool-less operation) - Intel N300 CPU (8 cores, 3.8GHz) - 16GB LPDDR5 RAM - 64GB onboard eMMC with umbrelOS

The chassis is milled from a single block of aluminum and framed with real American Walnut wood.

Here is a video of the manufacturing process if you want to nerd out on the machining details: https://youtu.be/4IAXfgBnRe8

Also, we built a "FailSafe" mode in umbrelOS, powered by ZFS raidz1. The coolest part is the flexibility: you can start with a single SSD and enable RAID later when you add the second drive (without wiping data), or enable it from day one if you start with multiple drives.

We also really obsessed over the thermal design. The magnetic lid on the bottom has a thermal pad that makes direct contact with all 4 NVMe SSDs, transferring heat into the aluminum. Air is pulled through the side vents on the lid, flows over the SSDs, then the motherboard/CPU, and exits the back. It runs whisper quiet.

Lots more details on our website, but we’ll be hanging out in the comments to answer any questions :)

It's fairly straightforward to add GPU support when running on the host, but LlamaGPT runs inside a Docker container, and that's where it gets a bit challenging.

Not sure how powerful their NAS is, but on Umbrel Home (which has an N5105 CPU), it's pretty useable with ~3 tokens generated per second.

It's powered by Nous Hermes Llama2 7b. From their docs: "This model stands out for its long responses, lower hallucination rate, and absence of OpenAI censorship mechanisms. [...] The model was trained almost entirely on synthetic GPT-4 outputs. Curating high quality GPT-4 datasets enables incredibly high quality in knowledge, task completion, and style."

The main difference is setting everything up yourself manually, downloading the modal, optimizing the parameters for best performance, running an API server and a UI front-end - which is out of reach for most non-technical people. With LlamaGPT, it's just one command: `docker compose up -d` or one click install for umbrelOS home server users.

Ah yes, running on GPU isn't supported at the moment. But CUDA (for Nvidia GPUs) and Metal support is on the roadmap!

It's an entire app (with a chatbot UI) that takes away the technical legwork to run the model locally. It's a simple one line `docker compose up -d` on any machine, or one click install on umbrelOS home servers.

Yes! It can run on any home server or cloud server.

Ah unfortunately that's not supported. When running umbrelOS on a Raspberry Pi, it stores everything on the HDD/SSD you connect to the Pi on install to make sure your data isn't susceptible to microSD card's wear and tear. So if you change the HDD/SSD, it will format the drive and use it as the main drive. And connecting two or more drives to the Pi isn't supported because the Pi lacks power to support more than 1 drive at once, causing abnormal behavior.

Curious what aspects of Umbrel do you find not satisfactory? I know you said you'd like to see something less crypto focused. Is it the selection of crypto-oriented apps in the app store that you don't like to see? (And I totally get if that's the case, just trying to understand.)

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.

I agree, that's my least favorite part of the site as well. We'll update it with a browsable directory of all the available apps in our app store soon.

Thanks for the insightful reply. Everything you said makes total sense.

Re noncommercial organizations being permitted users, this was a conscious decision on our part. We're purposefully building Umbrel purely for consumers, and don't plan to serve any commercial or noncommercial organizations. We want to align our incentives directly with consumers instead of enterprises, and this is purely to help us focus on building for the user-base that excites us the most.

I'm a big fan of Sandstorm btw. It was way ahead of its time.

Licensing is a nuanced subject so we've written a detailed post on it. But in short, our license grants you the same rights that come with an open source license, except the right to sell or commercialize Umbrel.

Here's our post that explains our licensing in detail: https://blog.getumbrel.com/everything-you-need-to-know-about...

Umbrel's source code is public and there's no vendor lock-in: https://github.com/getumbrel/umbrel