With the death of some old hardware I was using to run one of my nodes plus a few other bits and pieces, I've decided I'd quite like to simplify my always-on home hardware down to a single device.
With that in mind, I'm looking for both hardware and software recommendations for a standalone device capable of running the usual Bitcoin and Lightning nodes, but in addition to that, an Electrum server, an instance of mempool.space, a coinjoin server (be that JoinMarket or Samourai Dojo), and Bisq. I'd also like to potentially use this device to run a variety of non-bitcoin software, such as Pi-hole, personalized cloud storage, potentially a home media server, that sort of thing. Having looked in to it a bit, it seems that Umbrel might be the most straightforward way to do all this, and can run everything I've listed above except Bisq (although an app appears to be in the works).
My first question is whether anyone who has experience with this kind of thing would disagree about using Umbrel and would suggest just running something like Debian (or any other Linux distro)?
My second question is whether anyone could suggest some hardware which would be most appropriate for this. My main considerations are low power usage and being powerful enough to run everything I've listed above. I had originally looked at a Raspberry Pi 4, but I have some concerns about whether it could handle everything listed. At the moment I'm sort of considering the Orange Pi 5. I don't actually need it to be a single board computer at all - I'm just looking for energy efficiency with good enough hardware.
Hey hi o_e_l_e_o I'm actually answering you because I ran both Umbrel and Embassy on a raspberry pi4 but with poor results, in the sense that the Rasp as consumed remains very low but the software is a bit buggy but the risk is actually the raspberry same if there are sudden changes in voltage and it suddenly switches off, because it happened to me that the SD card gets corrupted easily and in all probability this happens due to the various presence of bugs in the os itself. I can't confirm it with certainty but since I installed raspian pi os lite I can say that I haven't had any other similar cases and I am currently running a bitcoin core on the main operating system while inside docker nextcloud, pihole, plex media server and I could continue to install many other applications in docker.
So to answer your question I advise you not to use plug and play systems but to have more control with a debian os and to take a single card for the performance/consumption ratio. There would also be the zima board
https://www.zimaboard.com/