Well, first of all, MicroBolt is strongly inspired by RaspiBolt and to a lesser extent by MiniBolt. That said, RaspiBolt is designed for Raspberry Pi's and has some problems:
  • They're not so cheap anymore
  • They are not reliable to operate Lightning
  • It is strongly limited at the hardware level
  • As for connecting a hard drive there is an important bottleneck of speed via USB
However, as a weekend or toy project it is a good project.

MicroBolt, on the other hand, changes the following things, with respect to RaspiBolt and MiniBolt:
  • It is based on AlpineLinux, you can read about this decision in the guide: link
  • We respect the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard (what the hell is a /data directory in the root filesystem?)
  • Related to the previous point, all programs are installed rationally with respect to what a Linux server should be and work
  • All own commands and scripts are POSIX-compliant, they do not depend on bashisms or other shells
  • I don't ask people to download patches or scripts and run them unknowingly, the unics that are downloaded are the binary files of LND, nothing else
  • All users created to operate the different programs (bitcoind, electrs, lnd...) have no interactive shell available or $HOME assigned
  • Disabled root account
  • The anti-ordinals first, means that Bitcoin Core has by default ordisrespector and that the alternative is Bitcoin Knots that already has anti-spam filters by default
  • All connections pass through the reverse proxy with TLS activated by default, including LND restful api to operate with ZeusLN (except public-pool stratum)
  • The guide includes in addition to the basic tools a public-pool mining pool, to mine with a bitaxe or nerdminer in your own pool
  • In the future, when I have enough sats to allow it, I will buy a raspi5 and adapt the guide to its architecture
  • Available in more than one language
  • Among many other things...
One more thing... is the possibility of running the OS and the node in RAM memory 🚀 (Alpine Diskless/Data mode) and having more than one installation in different USB and switching between different Setups by changing USB and restarting.
For example, you could have an usb1 with an installation with Bitcoin Core + electrs + LND and a usb2 with Bitcoin Knots + fulcrum + public-pool, and switch between the two configurations simply by changing the USB and restarting.
Or a usb1 with the superuser active and { doas || sudo } to update and install things, and an unprivileged usb2 without admin permissions, without { doas || sudo } and the minimum to boot and run the node.
Thanks! What about nvme support? I am running my node on the waveshare ups cm4 baseboard with nvme ssd disk. And, any idea how to integrate ina219 to safely shutdown on low batteries?
I am looking for possibilities to migrate from umbrel... However, I like its docker-based design.
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I think you're talking about something raspberrypi-related, right? MicroBolt isn't for raspberry yet, I think it won't be too much work to adapt, but it's not ready.
I know that containers like docker are convenient, but downloading images made by others is against don't trust, verify
lxc >>> docker
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