87 lines
5 KiB
Markdown
87 lines
5 KiB
Markdown
# Operation Saylor - Episode 8/120
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Hi again and welcome to another episode of the Operation Saylor. This is update number 8, corresponding to February
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2023.
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If you are reading this for first time, you might want to check [Episode 1](https://stacker.news/items/47539), where my
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plan and details are explained. That will get you in context.
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---
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## Stats
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- BTC stack: 1.4692 BTC
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- € stack: 436.60 €
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- Current total value in €: 34,407.44 €
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- € into BTC: 30,000 €
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- Paid back to bank: 2,929.60 €
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- Outstanding debt: 41,380.93 €
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- Installments to go: 113
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## Charts
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---
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## Log
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Another month passes by, and we are already well inside 2023.
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This past month I've been busy working on my node. Or to be more specific, working on my new node. In 2022, I
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started running an Umbrel node, which has been acting as my bitcoin and lightning node and is still alive and
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kicking as off today. But some time ago I decided I wanted to dettach myself from Umbrel, so I'm migrating my node
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over to a new machine and a new kind of deployment.
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I decided to ditch Umbrel for two reasons. The first one is that sometimes I want to play around within the "guts"
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of my node to modify things or add stuff that Umbrel doesn't offer, and so far doing this has always been a pain
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in the ass with Umbrel. My general experience is that it's risky and never ends up looking elegant, but feels rather
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like a poor work held together with duct tape. The second one is that updates have not been working properly with
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my Umbrel instance (I suspect this may be related with the previous point). This is a huge red flag, since I want to
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feel comfortable upgrading all the services in my node at any time. The couple of times LND broke the past year were
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good reminders of the importane of paying attention to updates in the Bitcoin domain.
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Just a disclaimer: I still think Umbrel is great. I don't want this rant to sound like I'm shitting on them.
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It's the only hope for a noob to run a node without going bald out of frustration, and it does the job nicely.
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It just comes short for a power user or someone that wants to have full and absolute control, which is completely
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fine since I don't think Umbrel's goal ever was to catter that audience.
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So, my plan is to move my node to a more powerful machine and deploy everything from scratch myself. So far, I
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have already deployed Bitcoin Core, electrs, mempool.space and LNbits. I'm using docker-compose to run all services
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as docker containers and keep them nicely integrated with their files, IP, port and other things consistent across
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services. It has been great to set this up since it forced me to learn a lot of things, specially about Bitcoin
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Core and electrs, that I didn't know. The kind of config details that Umbrel will happily hide away so you don't
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need to worry about.
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The next one will be LND, and it will be a tough bone. My intention is not to "kill" my own LND and start a new
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one over, but rather to "move" my LND from one machine to another. So, I need to craft a plan to stop LND on the
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old machine and start it again on the new one while keeping all data the exact same so that the service runs
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mostly uninterrupted and nothing changes from the point of view of my peers.
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A fun side story: the new machine I'll be running the node on is an old gaming desktop box. A neighbor was getting
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rid of it and I bumped into him when he was seconds away from throwing it into a garbage container. I asked a bit
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and apparently he just thought it was "too old" and already had bought a new one, so, to his eyes, it was garbage
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already. I asked him if I could keep it and he was more than happy to give it away to me.
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Long story short, the machine is running perfectly. I cleaned up the tons of dust that were living inside the
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case, bought some new hard drives (my neighbor had taken them out) and gave the CPU and new brush of thermal paste
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and voilà. It is not crazy powerful, but it's much better than the modern mini-pc in which I've been running my
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umbrel node so far. Since I'm a rather austere person, I was very happy to get my new machine this way. I can happily
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use the money I saved to get a few more sats, and the local garbage dump didn't need to take more stuff. It was
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also great to learn more about the hardware of desktop PCs. I had never before disassembled a desktop PC fully, so
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I had to do some research to get things done.
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I think that's enough for this month. Thanks for sticking around and see you in the next one.
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---
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## Previous episodes
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- Episode 1: [https://stacker.news/items/47539](https://stacker.news/items/47539)
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- Episode 2: [https://stacker.news/items/61708](https://stacker.news/items/61708)
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- Episode 3: [https://stacker.news/items/71794](https://stacker.news/items/71794)
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- Episode 4: [https://stacker.news/items/83670](https://stacker.news/items/83670)
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- Episode 5: [https://stacker.news/items/98216](https://stacker.news/items/98216)
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- Episode 6: [https://stacker.news/items/111818](https://stacker.news/items/111818)
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- Episode 7: [https://stacker.news/items/124601](https://stacker.news/items/124601)
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