Operation Saylor - Episode 8/120

Hi again and welcome to another episode of the Operation Saylor. This is update number 8, corresponding to February 2023.

If you are reading this for first time, you might want to check Episode 1, where my plan and details are explained. That will get you in context.

Another month passes by, and we are already well inside 2023.

This past month I've been busy working on my node. Or to be more specific, working on my new node. In 2022, I started running an Umbrel node, which has been acting as my bitcoin and lightning node and is still alive and kicking as off today. But some time ago I decided I wanted to dettach myself from Umbrel, so I'm migrating my node over to a new machine and a new kind of deployment.

I decided to ditch Umbrel for two reasons. The first one is that sometimes I want to play around within the "guts" of my node to modify things or add stuff that Umbrel doesn't offer, and so far doing this has always been a pain in the ass with Umbrel. My general experience is that it's risky and never ends up looking elegant, but feels rather like a poor work held together with duct tape. The second one is that updates have not been working properly with my Umbrel instance (I suspect this may be related with the previous point). This is a huge red flag, since I want to feel comfortable upgrading all the services in my node at any time. The couple of times LND broke the past year were good reminders of the importane of paying attention to updates in the Bitcoin domain.

Just a disclaimer: I still think Umbrel is great. I don't want this rant to sound like I'm shitting on them. It's the only hope for a noob to run a node without going bald out of frustration, and it does the job nicely. It just comes short for a power user or someone that wants to have full and absolute control, which is completely fine since I don't think Umbrel's goal ever was to catter that audience.

So, my plan is to move my node to a more powerful machine and deploy everything from scratch myself. So far, I have already deployed Bitcoin Core, electrs, mempool.space and LNbits. I'm using docker-compose to run all services as docker containers and keep them nicely integrated with their files, IP, port and other things consistent across services. It has been great to set this up since it forced me to learn a lot of things, specially about Bitcoin Core and electrs, that I didn't know. The kind of config details that Umbrel will happily hide away so you don't need to worry about.

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 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 old machine and start it again on the new one while keeping all data the exact same so that the service runs mostly uninterrupted and nothing changes from the point of view of my peers.

A fun side story: the new machine I'll be running the node on is an old gaming desktop box. A neighbor was getting rid of it and I bumped into him when he was seconds away from throwing it into a garbage container. I asked a bit and apparently he just thought it was "too old" and already had bought a new one, so, to his eyes, it was garbage already. I asked him if I could keep it and he was more than happy to give it away to me.

Long story short, the machine is running perfectly. I cleaned up the tons of dust that were living inside the case, bought some new hard drives (my neighbor had taken them out) and gave the CPU and new brush of thermal paste and voilà. It is not crazy powerful, but it's much better than the modern mini-pc in which I've been running my 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 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 also great to learn more about the hardware of desktop PCs. I had never before disassembled a desktop PC fully, so I had to do some research to get things done.

I think that's enough for this month. Thanks for sticking around and see you in the next one.