Bitcoin Node in a Orange Pi 5 with Umbrel

This post is my first experience with Orange Pi 5, and I had to do some different things to put it all together working.

The equipment:

The idea of this post is to start from the moment you have an operating system working in your Orange Pi 5. There are a lot of guides teaching this on the internet, so it's not worth wasting time on it. I used this video to learn, and it is phenomenal.

I selected the Orangepi5_1.1.0_ubuntu_jammy_desktop_xfce_linux5.10.110.7z image, so if you chose another one, some things here might not apply to you.

To see the options of images, use the Orange Pi website, this link.

I got the desktop version because Umbrel needs a graph interface. Another request of Umbrel is a SO with 64 bits.

The Orange Pi 5 CPU supports 64 bits, but I don't know why they don't add this to the image I spoke about before, so we need to run the following command:

sudo dpkg --add-architecture amd64 ## adding 64-bits architecture package

Now we can install Umbrel. Here I had another problem, I only have a 64 GB MicroSD Card. I could run out of space quickly (I want to add more things to the PC), so I decided to put a 2T external hard drive on the USB 3 port of the Orange Pi. To do this right, that's what I could do with my poor knowledge of Linux. I learned a lot from this video:

I had to mount the external hard drive in the mnt folder because I wanted it as part of my system.

To do this, insert the external hard drive into the USB, then use the lsblk command:

> lsblk

NAME        MAJ:MIN RM  SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINTS
sda           8:0    0  1.8T  0 disk
└─sda1        8:1    0  1.8T  0 part
mtdblock0    31:0    0   16M  0 disk
mmcblk1     179:0    0 59.5G  0 disk
├─mmcblk1p1 179:1    0  256M  0 part /boot
└─mmcblk1p2 179:2    0 58.6G  0 part /var/log.hdd
                                     /
zram0       254:0    0  7.7G  0 disk [SWAP]
zram1       254:1    0  200M  0 disk /var/log

You should see something with the name sda or similar... That's the name Linux gives when you have something on USB.

With this name in hand, let's do the following:

cd /mnt
mkdir disk1
sudo mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/disk1/

The /dev/ is standard, and you should add it in front of sda1 or a similar name you have there.

When you run the mount command, it only works for the current session. To make it mount when there is a boot, you need to change the /etc/fstab file and add this line at the end of it /dev/sda1 mnt/disk1 ext4 default 0 0. Mine looked like this:

> cat /etc/fstab
UUID=bc3a0620-7f52-4f69-9d48-be19c533ab12 / ext4 defaults,noatime,commit=600,errors=remount-ro 0 1
UUID=E429-E94B /boot vfat defaults 0 2
tmpfs /tmp tmpfs defaults,nosuid 0 0
/dev/sda1 /mnt/disk1 ext4 defaults 0 0

The following parameter is /mnt/disk1/, where it will mount. Once done, the next step is to install and configure docker. I didn't have any problems with the installation, so you shouldn't either. Just follow any of these options.

Once established, I wanted to change where docker will save the data. Docker keeps everything in a single directory. The default value is /var/lib/docker. In my case, I want it to save on my external hard drive. To do this, we will create a folder on it and configure docker:

I am considering two things in the script. One is that the daemon.json file does not exist. It is not created during the installation of docker. The second point is that I use nano to edit the file. Do as you think is best.

cd /mnt/disk1
mkdir docker-data
cd /etc/docker
touch daemon.json
nano daemon.json

The file should stay like this:

{
  "data-root" : "/mnt/disk1/docker-data"
}

Now, restart the docker

service docker restart

If you do an ls /mnt/disk1/docker-data you will see several items created. Let's install Umbrel now. I also want to install it on my external hard drive. By default, it will store the applications' data in the app-data folder created where it was installed. To install, I used the command below with three parameters, one to change the directory and two to not install the docker because we already installed it.

cd /mnt/disk1
mkdir umbrel
curl -L https://umbrel.sh | bash -s -- --install-path /mnt/disk1/umbrel/ --no-install-docker --no-install-compose

The final log of command will be something like that:

Creating manager   ... done
Creating auth      ... done
Creating tor_proxy ... done
Creating dashboard ... done
Creating nginx     ... done

Removing status server iptables entry...
Exiting iptables setup when not on Umbrel OS

Starting installed apps...

Umbrel is now accessible at
  http://orangepi5.local
  http://10.0.0.147
Skipping status update when not on Umbrel OS

Umbrel has been sucessfully installed!

When you open this URL in the browser, Umbrel will already be ready. Just install the apps you want and enjoy.

January 18, 2023

Background image credits forImmo Wegmann

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My first experience with Orange Pi 5

Bitcoin Node in a Orange Pi 5 with Umbrel