[HN Gopher] Show HN: Umbrel - A personal server OS for self-hosting
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Show HN: Umbrel - A personal server OS for self-hosting
Author : mayankchhabra
Score : 87 points
Date : 2022-06-07 17:26 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (umbrel.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (umbrel.com)
| xz18r wrote:
| I have a home server with Docker containers running, some of them
| exposed publicly. Am I the target audience?
| Jeff_Brown wrote:
| Why is setting up your own server so hard? I recently tried to
| set up an SSH server on NixOS and gave up after a day. And I love
| NixOS.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| I see it offers home assistant. I wonder if you can also use the
| addon functionality in that as it's based on docker containers..
| I assume umbrel uses docker too so it might conflict?
| evulhotdog wrote:
| It feels like it has a lot of shared territory with FreeNAS or
| Synology without the hardware.
|
| What support, if any, is there for reading S.M.A.R.T. Stats, ZFS,
| and BTRFS? You mention CPU temps, but what about things that
| actually matter in regular use cases?
| mihaic wrote:
| While the product itself also looks interesting, I'd mainly want
| to congragulate the developers on their choice of licensing.
| While it might not be for everyone, there really needs to be a
| larger movement of exploring and upgrading OSS licensing models
| to better fit today's digital economy.
| agentdrtran wrote:
| How will this be different from previous services that tried this
| type of product and failed?
| leodriesch wrote:
| Just out of interest, could you list some?
| leodriesch wrote:
| What does the backup experience look like? I feel like that is a
| major difficulty for people looking to self host, at least for
| me.
|
| I would not want to lose my pictures, contacts or NextCloud files
| due to some update failure, hardware failure or my own mistake in
| managing the system.
| nathan_phoenix wrote:
| Looks great on first look, but on closer inspection saw that it's
| written in pure JavaScript (0% TypeScript) + Bash. Honestly makes
| me a bit worried about security. Now, I'm not so thrilled about
| it anymore...
| vorpalhex wrote:
| I think you are misunderstanding something about security or
| typescript...
| smcleod wrote:
| Yeah... JS/node/electron - I could do with far less of these
| things in my life, not more - especially when it comes to
| security vulnerabilities.
| candiddevmike wrote:
| I think the overlap of folks who want to self host and folks who
| don't already use a preferred Linux distro or Windows is quite
| small.
| walrus01 wrote:
| exactly, the stuff I self host is based on debian-stable or
| debian-testing amd64 starting from a very normal barebones
| debian CLI-only configuration (about 1GB of disk space
| occupied), and adding stuff from there.
| yunohn wrote:
| That's a fair point, but there are lots of people who want one
| less thing to manage - the underlying infrastructure is a large
| piece to offload from the mental load of self hosting.
| nfgrep wrote:
| This.
|
| Even with my favourite distro, being a sys-admin gets
| annoying after a while.
| woojoo666 wrote:
| If self hosting were as easy and stable as signing up for a
| cloud service, I think people would switch
| Hamuko wrote:
| How do you suppose that would happen? You need some kind of
| hardware to self-host.
| leodriesch wrote:
| I think just renting a machine and installing your own
| software/OS is also beneficial to using cloud services from
| a privacy perspective, e.g. running your own NextCloud on
| Hetzner or the likes.
| [deleted]
| melony wrote:
| Looks good, I have some questions.
|
| Are security updates and DevOps automatic? How fine grained are
| the security updates i.e. Kernel level or app level? How long
| does it take end-to-end from CVE patch release to end user
| applying the update?
| PontifexMinimus wrote:
| This is a service I'm interested in, but by fuck is their website
| annoying. Instead of having stupid moving rectangles of services
| you can run on Umbrel, why not just display each service as a
| paragraph of text, with an icon next to it? No animations, and no
| rectangles moving across the screen.
|
| These people have put a good deal of effort into their landing
| screen, unfortunately this effort has made it worse than it would
| have been if it was simple text descriptions. Please improve
| this.
| mayankchhabra wrote:
| 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.
| PontifexMinimus wrote:
| This would be really useful, as it would allow people to
| quickly highlight where they would find it useful for them.
| layer8 wrote:
| At this point, any marketing copy using the word "beautiful" is a
| major turn-off for me.
| chrisshroba wrote:
| Pretty sure I'm in the minority of HN folks, but I'm a fan of
| tools/OS'es/whatever that make a concerted effort to follow
| design trends and present a modern-looking UX.
| matyasrichter wrote:
| I don't think it's a minority. It's just that those who
| dislike these trends are far more vocal than those who
| appreciate them.
| layer8 wrote:
| To "follow design trends and present a modern-looking UX" is
| far from synonymous with "beautiful", which in turn is very
| much in the eye of the beholder. The problem with "beautiful"
| is that it's a manipulative fluff word which gives no
| information whatsoever about the product except that its
| marketing people seem to want the product to be perceived as
| beautiful. The other problem is its inflationary use. Every
| other product thinks it needs to add "beautiful" to its tag
| line.
| eightysixfour wrote:
| In the middle of building a self-hosting setup at home so I went
| ahead and installed this to give it a trial run. I generally like
| the interface and think it is a nice take on making self-hosting
| easier, but I have some pure stream of conscious criticism:
|
| 1. There sure are a lot of crypto apps. I'm not vehemently anti-
| crypto, but it is missing some "obvious" applications and full of
| those, so I'm curious what the play was there. They're all spread
| all over the place isntead of in a single category too. There are
| non-crypto finance apps that are self-hosted (Actual, BudgE,
| etc.), please don't mix them.
|
| 2. Plex and/or jellyfin stand out as huge misses right out of the
| gate.
|
| 3. I am surprised that it doesn't use nginx proxy manager with
| preset configs to make this all available from a single domain.
| Needs letsencrypt + a DDNS provider too while you're at it.
|
| 4. Why no blog/cms?
|
| 5. Can I give it the docker-compose config for an application not
| on the app store somewhere in GUI?
|
| 6. Wait, why is this accessible from Tor? And I can't turn it
| off? Nope nope nope.
| nfgrep wrote:
| After wrestling with TrueNAS for months, this looks pretty good.
| I also really, reaally like the initiative to make self-hosting
| accessible.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Is this an OS or just a distro? They claim you can convert an
| Ubuntu install by just curl-ing their script, which makes me lean
| toward distro.
| yebyen wrote:
| There is an OS in there, at least one, I haven't installed
| Umbrel but I know this is in it... (I can't believe all these
| comments and nobody mentioned Urbit yet!)
| [deleted]
| nathan_phoenix wrote:
| Love it! Private self hosting but made easy for the people (like
| me) who don't want to spend hours setting it all up and keeping
| it up to date! Also the design looks amazing, finally some open
| source project with an actual designer haha
|
| Btw can't sign up for the newsletter although tried multiple
| emails and disabled adblocker. Just says "Oops! Something went
| wrong. Can you please try again?"...
| anderspitman wrote:
| How does it compare to Sandstorm, yunohost, and Cloudron?
| ensignavenger wrote:
| It defintely needs some documentation! It is closed source
| proprietary software, so that is one major difference.
| Johnnynator wrote:
| It is Open Source, but under a Non-Free License (PolyForm
| Noncommercial License 1.0.0).
| ensignavenger wrote:
| The PolyForm Noncommercial License 1.0.0 is not an Open
| Source license.
| Johnnynator wrote:
| Fair, one can see this as just source available. But
| still far more permissive than cloudron's license.
| ensignavenger wrote:
| Okay, I will admit I am only familiar with Sandstorm from
| that list :)
| mayankchhabra wrote:
| 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...
| kentonv wrote:
| No, it's not Open Source. It's a perfectly justifiable
| decision, but it's not Open Source, nor is it equivalent.
|
| Yes, your license means that individual users can make
| little patches to customize the product to their needs,
| and even share these customizations with other users.
| That's great!
|
| But the license effectively prohibits borrowing code from
| your codebase for use in other projects, meaning your
| code does not become part of the aether of Open Source
| code that anyone can build upon. That's a very important
| part of what it means to be "Open Source".
|
| It also effectively prevents any large-scale modification
| or forking effort, since maintaining patches as the
| underlying codebase evolves is a hard job, and the
| license prohibits people from funding such effort. If
| users want timely security updates, they will need to
| stick close to your version of the codebase. So the lock-
| in is there.
|
| Again, this is all a perfectly justified direction for
| you to take. I don't blame you at all, and I definitely
| understand that it's Amazon's fault that we cannot have
| nice things. But it's not Open Source.
|
| On a tangentially-related note, a little tip: You have
| defined all noncommercial organizations -- including
| education, public research, and government -- as being
| permitted users. That may be dangerous. I was the founder
| of Sandstorm, and these organizations were exactly the
| ones most interested in paying for our product --
| literally the only big sales we ever made were a couple
| universities, a big research org, and a government.
| Despite being non-profit, these orgs have lots of money
| and a need for self-hosting.
| mayankchhabra wrote:
| 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.
| kentonv wrote:
| I see. Well, I hope you are able to succeed at that. For
| what it's worth, we initially focused on consumer use but
| weren't able to find a path to revenue there.
|
| Despite a lot of noise on HN, we had only a few hundred
| signups for our paid hosting service. We built super-
| scalable hosting tech but it turned out we could have
| hosted them on a single big VM all along... oops.
|
| I think the problem is that the apps, while functional,
| weren't competitive with their SaaS competitors, and so
| the only reason to use the hosting service was if you
| really cared about the Open Source aspect. Maybe if we
| had a killer app that was actually better than any SaaS
| alternative, we could have gotten somewhere? But we never
| found that.
|
| Meanwhile, we got a lot of feedback from people working
| at big orgs that were forced to self-host for regulatory
| reasons. Such orgs are terribly served by the current
| software market, since they can essentially only buy
| software from companies that specialize in building
| regulated software, and those companies generally build
| software that is expensive and terrible.
|
| Real-time collaboration essentially didn't exist in this
| market, making our apps actually better than what these
| organizations had! But we had absolutely no expertise in
| selling to orgs like this, and we never really figured it
| out. We should have hired for it much earlier, or maybe
| even brought on another co-founder with enterprise sales
| experience.
|
| So, we were unable to get anywhere before investors
| pulled the plug.
|
| With that said, I always say you should not trust
| anyone's advice. Your story is different and you need to
| do what makes intuitive sense to you. If your intuition
| is right, you succeed. But you certainly can't succeed by
| going against your own intuition, so if someone says
| something that doesn't make intuitive sense to you,
| ignore it.
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| To be fair, I think Umbrel has a very different consumer
| story: Since it has a much stronger crypto focus, it is
| targeting consumers much more likely to spend
| (crypto)money, I think, than the average consumer.
|
| And a key difference is that Cloudron and Umbrel may
| monetize selfhosters, which I believe Sandstorm did not
| endeavor to do at all.
| kentonv wrote:
| Ah hah... Well... I have no intuition for what might
| succeed in the cryptocurrency space.
|
| With Sandstorm we did plan to have paid apps and in-app
| purchases eventually, believe it or not...
| ignoramous wrote:
| > _It 's a perfectly justifiable decision..._
|
| Especially when one of the VC firms that funds your
| project is also the one behind formulation of the
| _PolyForm_ set of licenses, I 'd imagine. At least,
| _PolyForm_ is better, in some sense, than fully closed
| source projects built atop other MIT /BSD/Apache licensed
| projects (say, the V8 JavaScript engine ;), and never
| shared.
|
| The only reason I dislike non-OSI approved licenses are,
| the "users" of such licenses want to have their cake and
| eat it too: As in, they want to project open source ethos
| while also denying the advantages/rights otherwise
| afforded by Open Source, as defined by the OSI.
|
| Imo, source-available licenses are _justified_ only when
| companies using it are honest about their intentions and
| forthcoming about the license 's limitations. Nothing
| specific on Umbrel, but generally, misdirection by firms
| insistent on source-available licenses as being some
| convenient 'middle-ground' is off-putting, to say the
| least!
|
| I've followed Umbrel since I first stumbled upon it in
| August 2020, and of course, I'd have liked them to be
| open-source (since I don't believe software is their core
| advantage, rather their brand is; but then again, what do
| I know): https://github.com/getumbrel/umbrel/issues/291#i
| ssuecomment-...
|
| That said, Umbrel already brings a lot to the table...
| its licensing is a predictable HN distraction from
| discussion on its true potential.
| ensignavenger wrote:
| Except it denies me the right to purchase support
| services from the vendor of my choosing. It also denies
| me the ability to hire a contractor of my choosing to
| create a derivative of the product or even contribute
| changes to the product. It further denies me the ability
| to receive sponsorship from another individual to create
| a derivative work (This falls under commercializing, but
| the other two would not be me doing the commercializing).
|
| These are all rights I have with Open Source software
| that is denied by your non-commercial license. Reading
| your blog post, you seem to not understand Open Source
| nor do you seem to understand the implications of your
| own license very well.
| [deleted]
| ensignavenger wrote:
| If some one is going through the trouble of self hosting, why
| would they want to use a closed source proprietary OS to do it?
| Most of the apps available for this are open source, so why not
| host them on an open source system and not have any vendor lock-
| in?
| mayankchhabra wrote:
| Umbrel's source code is public and there's no vendor lock-in:
| https://github.com/getumbrel/umbrel
| ensignavenger wrote:
| The license forbids me to hire another vendor to service the
| product. That is the definition of vendor lock-in.
| pengaru wrote:
| > The license forbids me to hire another vendor to service
| the product. That is the definition of vendor lock-in.
|
| Where in the license does it forbid such a thing?
| Commercial use != an individual paying for third party
| support/service/development.
| ensignavenger wrote:
| I don't know what the intended definition of Commercial
| is, as it is not defined in the license, but the common
| definition is:
|
| >> used for selling goods or providing services for
| money, rather than for personal use
|
| (https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/comm
| erci...)
|
| An individual being paid to provide a service is
| commercial under that, and most legal definitions of the
| word.
| leodriesch wrote:
| There is a License FAQ [0], in which it says:
|
| > Selling Umbrel, including selling cloud-hosted
| instances with Umbrel or its derivates, home server
| hardware with Umbrel or its derivates, support services
| for Umbrel or its derivates, etc is not permitted under
| our license.
|
| [0]: https://github.com/getumbrel/umbrel/wiki/License-FAQ
| api wrote:
| They want something with good UI/UX and that is maintained and
| that they don't have to spend hours a week futzing around with?
|
| There is nothing "free as in beer" that even comes close to
| this in polish. This is gorgeous.
| ensignavenger wrote:
| There are plenty of Open Source solutions that fit that
| description. Of course what one person thinks of as 'good'
| another may think is 'bad' and there may be enough folks who
| think the same way as the Umbrel folks to make it work. I
| certainly wish them well in their endeavors.
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