Thread by @mutatrum

Installing @getumbrel on an Odroid HC4.

A small guide 👇

https://twitter.com/mutatrum/status/1346077843244122112

Why the Odroid HC4? It's self-contained, it can boot from a SATA SSD, doesn't need any adapters, cables, SD cards, workarounds or other stuff.

It only uses a 1 TB Samsung 860 QVO SSD.

Total hardware cost is ~$150.

Why Umbrel? It's a slick interface, defaults all traffic over tor, has an app store so you can easily add f.e. BTCPay Server or Specter Desktop.

First, download the latest Ubuntu minimal 20.04 LTS from wiki.odroid.com/odroid-hc4/os_…

Flash it with Balena Etcher or (oh the irony) Raspberry Imager. You can use any USB enclosure or SATA adapter. So yes, you need one, briefly, only for this part.

Alternative if you don't have an USB SATA adapter or enclosure, you can work around this by flashing Ubuntu Mate on a SD card and use the HC4 itself to prepare the SSD. It's a bit more cumbersome, but works. The SD card is only temporary.

After the imaging, stick the SSD in the toaster, connect a network cable, power it up and wait ~1 minute for it to boot. As part of first boot it will auto resize partitions to use the whole disk.

Log in with
$ ssh root@odroid

password is 'odroid'.

Upgrade system to latest and install dependencies:

$ apt-get update
$ apt-get full-upgrade
$ apt-get install fswatch jq rsync curl python3 python3-pip
$ apt autoremove

This also cleans 🧹 some superfluous packages.

Install docker:

$ curl -fsSL get.docker.com -o get-docker.sh
$ sh ./get-docker.sh

Install docker-compose:

$ pip3 install docker-compose

This one takes a bit longer, 'Building wheel for pynacl' takes several minutes.

Change hostname to 'umbrel':

$ hostnamectl set-hostname umbrel
$ echo umbrel > /etc/hostname

Not mandatory to change to umbrel, but this works around a small (non-critical) UI issue in the current version of umbrel.

Also, change password:

$ passwd

Reboot machine for hostname change:

$ reboot

and after a minute or so, log in again on new hostname:

$ ssh root@umbrel

Make a folder for umbrel, download umbrel and start it, this is taken from github.com/getumbrel/umbr…:

$ mkdir umbrel
$ cd umbrel
$ curl -L github.com/getumbrel/umbr… | tar -xz --strip-components=1
$ ./scripts/start

This takes a while on first run, as it has to download the world.

When it's done, after a few minutes, go to your browser and find http://umbrel/ there, waiting with a welcome screen:

From here, umbrel takes over with a super slick onboarding process. Important: note down your secret words!

One last thing: #cwiaf

It then starts downloading and validating the bitcoin blockchain. It takes a bit before the percentage progress starts, as it first downloads block headers. On the bitcoin tab, you can view logs under the ... menu at the right, to see what's happening under the hood.

If you opted to keep 'odroid' as hostname, or changed it to something other than 'umbrel', the log doesn't show anything. Change the filter in the top right to your hostname and bitcoin.

After the block headers, you see the progress on the dashboard.

This thread was written in real time. I did one trail run, re-imaged the disk and started ~ 1 hour ago.

Everything is usable already, due to some cleverness from the devs.

I'll add a message when the sync is done.

Have fun getting umbrel! ☂️

For reference, all 16 commands:

As pointed out by @dstadulis, the docker shell script download should be over https:

One halving done, 81 minutes in. Header download took 10 minutes. This speed will not sustain, blocks get more difficult to validate from 2017 on.

https://twitter.com/mutatrum/status/1346176394259214339?s=19

Second halving done, 14 hours after the start. Note the progress, it's at 23%.

Last night it passed 50% of the work done, 34½ hours after the start. It processed the busy 2017 hype cycle.