My Umbrel stopped installing software

Support and Troubleshooting
1

Howdy,

I’ve been running an Umbrel for many months, mostly successfully, although it started getting difficult to keep pi-hole up and running between updates. Consistent with that, after trying to update pi-hole and uptime kuma today using the GUI prompts, pi-hole didn’t update/install and got stuck. Since use pi-hole for DNS at a router level, things got ugly quickly. I could not log into the Umbrel from a second browser tab to restart it.

In hindsight I should have just pointed my router back to google or something while troubleshooting, and tried to get into the Umbrel with a putty session, but I hard-booted the Umbrel instead (something I hate to do for obvious reasons.)

This got me back to a login screen but since then every app I try to install gets stuck at “installing.” It boots/shut down, runs fine, and uninstalls software, but won’t install anything. I’m now down to just bitcoin core after removing everything and trying to re-install stuff.

Should I proceed with troubleshooting or maybe just start over? I’ve been running it a while, across many versions/updates, and I kind of get the impression it would be good to start fresh with a new OS. I’m not thrilled about having to download the whole blockchain again though, even on a gig connection (I recall it was really slow on the other end.)

Thoughts? Can I provide any logs that might help?

Cheers!

Lou

1 Like
2

Which version do you have and which version were you trying to install? Log will help

3

umbrel-1660410395818-debug.log (18.4 KB)

Here’s some logs. I did not keep track of versioning for pi-hole, it was the first time I’ve ever been prompted to update the app by the Umbrel OS so I just went with it.

Also in case it helps I’m running on a Raspberry Pi 4 with a Samsung SSD, wired ethernet.

Cheers!

Lou

4

Hi there,

I ended up with the very same problem after installing Pi-hole update…

5

So I decided to take the plunge; re-install Umbrel OS and attempt to preserve my existing blockchain. I backed up the blockchain data using PSCP transfer over my network, in anticipation of losing it and trying to save myself from an initial blockchain download. The backup took a while (several hours) but went well. I shut down the Umbrel, re-flashed the MicroSD, left my SSD intact and re-started.

Low and behold my Umbrel password was still set, Bitcoin core found my original blockchain data, re-synced the remaining few blocks that came in since shutdown, and I’m off to the races again! My backed-up blockchain was not even necessary. Apps now install fine.

I didn’t expect it to be this easy but I’m delighted that it worked.

Cheers!