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1. Umbrel VM Installation

Umbrel can be installed both on bare metal oras on a VM. However, as VM.mentioned Thein goalthe ofintroduction Umbrelwe iswould making installing an application so simple as just clicking on install app. Now, this is great since a user now does not needrecommend to understand anything of the docker compose configuration to set up an app. However, it does come with some drawbacks of course that need to be discussed.

    First of all you don't have ZFS under the hood. Everything is stored on the same drive It does not come with a simple backup solution You can only install applications that the Umbrel library provides you with

    However, you could solve problems 1 and 2 fairly simple by setting it up as a VM in proxmox. You can just attach a virtual drive to the VM that under the hoods already sits in a zfs pool. Then by using proxmox PBS you can take easy backups from the whole VM.

    Hence, we will also installstore it as a VM byon usingyour Proxmox server. In this way you are not limited to the belovedapp store of Umbrel, you can use PBS to backup the whole Umbrel VM and you can still create other VM's, Backupfriends etcetera. As usual we always check if a Proxmox Backuphelper Scriptsscript is available for the installation to make it as easy as possible ;) YouAnd low and behold there is of course and you can find it here !!

    Multicast DNS 

    Now, once Umbrel is installed on your VM you can reach it by using the local dns name http://umbrel.local. Now, why does this work suddenly without a DNS entry on your home network ? Well it makes use of something called Multicast DNS(mDNS). This is quite some awesome technology since it allows non tech users to just plug in the device in their router and it just works !! That is some ease of use over there ;) It is not only Umbrel that makes use of this but many many routers, switches or other IOT devices that make it easy for users to navigate to the dashboard of their device. 

    Multicast DNS (mDNS) works by allowing devices on a local network to resolve hostnames to IP addresses without needing a dedicated DNS server. It sends multicast queries to all devices in the network, and the device that owns the hostname responds with its IP address, allowing all devices to update their mDNS caches

    Now, unfortunately this only works. 

     

     

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