Hi,
Since years, I ran a yunohost on a Excito B3, a small server with 512 MB powered with an Armel processor.
Since recently, Yunohost is no more supported on Armel.
As the only service hosted by this server is a mail server for 4 people, I do not want to stop it.
Do you know any alternative?
Perhaps something driven by Ansible to deploy efficiently the services from a simplified description of the DNS and users?
Hi @guyou,
I see you asked this Upgrade to Bookworm Impossible on armel and it is where you were told armel is not more supported when upgrading to bookworm.
Your Excito B3 is based on a Marvell 88F6281 which is ARMv5TE-compliant then armel. This is 32bit old arm, since then ARMv7 with armh came and nowadays all is 64bits. Even armh support start to disappear…
When i look for it, It look like it has never been really supported widely, from this topic What would be necessary to have build for armel platform it is told that it is a matter of finding contributors …
On the other hand Yunohost mail is based on postfix for mail so upgrading only postfix might be enough to continue to support it but by losing any fancy support of users… This is now a matter of removing the yunohost layer and relying only on debian… Not sure if there is so much documentation on how to fall back to debian.
As you see i don’t really come with answers, i just digged in your question and added some context…
After a second though, yunohost packages as such, ssowat and moulinette are for all architectures, so it is one of their dependencies that is lost on armel.
This was not a decision to not support armel anymore, just the fact that this architecture is not part of supported one so no check is done whether it is broken or not.
Thank you @artlog for your answers.
As I remember, the issue comes when I try to upgrade the Debian distribution: the package yunohost is marked to be removed. I will try to indentify the missing package, just to see where the effective issue comes from.
When opening this thread, my intention was to discuss the alternative solutions for people like me trying to host ONLY their mail server. For such people, Yunohost is probably too heavy. But even in the scope of mail, yunohost provides a lot of features hidden by a trivial UI (users, alias, antispam…). So I suspect it is a lot of work to learn to do this manually, with a raw Debian.
A friend of mine had a look to https://mailcow.email/. But the requirements announce 6 GB of RAM. This is clearly not the solution for me as I only have 4 users and as I try to be as frugal as possible.
Yesterday, I found https://stalw.art/ in another thread on this forum. I will give it a try, I think.
PS: of course, I can also decide to drop my B3… but it works. 
Why not https://mailinabox.email/ ?
Mailcow is made for many users.
I disliked what I read on /enterprise/ about stalw.art stuff, like This premium version offers a suite of additional features tailored to meet the demands of enterprise environments, ensuring superior flexibility, security, and customization. With a commercial license, you can enjoy the full power of Stalwart without the limitations of the AGPLv3 license, … blablabla.
It’s debian that’s dropping the support
From trixie, armel is no longer supported as a regular architecture: there is no Debian installer for armel systems, and only Raspberry Pi 1, Zero, and Zero W are supported by the kernel packages.
Users running armel systems can upgrade to trixie, provided their hardware is supported by the kernel packages, or they use a third-party kernel.
trixie will be the last release for the armel architecture. Debian recommends, where possible, reinstalling armel systems as armhf or arm64, or retiring the hardware.
And bookworm is still supported
The Debian 12 life cycle encompasses five years: the initial three years of full Debian support, until June 10th, 2026, and two years of Long Term Support (LTS), until June 30th, 2028
So I suppose you can still use yunohost for a quite long time till you plan upgrading your hardware, unless you find an os that will continue to support it