Start9 has an excellent support and community site for going beyond the products they sell and the OS they've produced. But Start9 being very security oriented has many clearnet obstacles to prevent plebs from being exposed to the wild Internet of hacks.
Here is a
Guide: Bolt cards, Lightning Address and Reverse Proxy all the things (2023)
Where you can use clearnet to punch through tor to access your services and make the most of your start9 OS. I'm using their Raspberry PI version for non Bitcoin things and I've built a more robust system with an I5 for Bitcoin. I've run into hiccups where I could not do what I wanted with my own domains so finding this is pretty exciting. I haven't tried it yet so stay tuned.
If you have a similar experience with Umbrel or StartOS please comment after reading their Guide.
One of my favorite things about StartOS from Start9 is the attention paid to privacy. On your local network the Services (apps) are secured by using https and hidden behind complex URLs so that they can’t be discovered.
On the internet these Services run safely behind Tor (entirely in most cases, should you configure them that way) and again are impossible to find thanks to randomly generated Tor onion addresses.
When running Services on StartOS behind Tor, in particular leaky Lightning software, no-one is going to be able to work out where you’re geographically located. Your privacy is protected by Tor and your IP address isn’t exposed.
But for some this focus on privacy can get in the way of practical day to day use of these pieces of software. Tor leaves you unreachable to the hoards of normies on clearnet, and it stops you in your tracks when client software you use doesn’t support it.