Cannot reach Umbrel after configuring OpenClaw

1

I tried installing and configuring OpenClaw yesterday on my Umbrel Home with 1.5 Umbrel OS. I may have tried to configure it with a model that was too large given all the other apps that I was running and available memory (16G). I went to stop some of the other apps in order to reclaim some memory and they would not stop (showed a spinner). At that point everything was frozen. I was not able to do a “sudo reboot” from the ssh shell.

I unplugged the power cable for 30s and plugged it back in. All the lights on the device show appropriately green. After waiting 1h I still could not access it use http://umbrel.local or ssh -t umbrel@umbrel.local. I can see that the device is on my home network with IP 10.0.0.51 and I can ping it. However, I cannot access it with http://10.0.0.51 or ssh -t umbrel@10.0.0.51 either. I tried lots of other AI suggestions, but nothing is working. After waiting another 24h I tried again, but still could not access it.

As I see it, my only 2 remaining options are to

  1. Take it apart and plug in a monitor and keyboard directly to the internal hidden html and USB ports in order to better diagnose what is going wrong.
  2. reflash OS from USB stick. This is something that I am very reluctant to do because it means loosing all of my data.

I will now try both of those last ditch options in that order unless I hear better suggestions.

2

I opened up the Umbrel and plugged in a monitor and keyboard. After plugging in the power cable, I saw that it keep restarting. Every 2 minutes it would show the login briefly and then restart. This is why I could not get ssh access. Somehow I was able to login when in this state and removed openClaw, pllama, and Open WebUI from apps: in umbrel.yaml so that they would not try to start them at startup. That fixed the restarts and allowed me to connect from my PC using ssh -t umbrel@10.0.0.51. However, I still am not able to connect through a browser using umbrel.local or http://10.0.0.51.

It seems that the dashboard docker container is not running and I don’t know how to get it running again. I really don’t want to reflash because that may lose data.

I have tried things suggested by the AI like force restarting services using sudo systemctl stop umbrel-startup && sudo systemctl start umbrel-startup.

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3

As a last resort, I used a usb stick to reflash the umbrel. This clears all my apps, but hopefully not my data. It did work. I am now reinstalling all my apps. Bitcoin Knots is doing a resync that will take many hours. It does not look like data was preserved as far as I can tell…