I have a thin client addiction. You all have seen my 3x Dell Wyse 5060 Hyperconverged Cluster project. And you know that I bought a Dell Wyse 3040. But, I actually bought 3x 3040s, and someone sent me a Wyse 7010, and an HP T620 (yet to be reviewed). And now I bought another. An HP T530. I’d consider this to be an excellent choice for anyone wanting to run Home Assistant, since it has enough power for, an upgradeable M.

Proxmox has a pretty good backup scheduler, but it relies on the backup destination being mounted as a storage location. This implies that the backup destination needs to be a protocol that Proxmox supports - SMB (CIFS), NFS, … or Proxmox Backup Server. If you want to push your backups to a cloud service, you probably need something a bit more complicated. Thankfully, Proxmox’s backup scheduler thought about this and has a hook feature we can use for this purpose, and we can use any protocol supported on the Debian base system, including things such as FUSE or s3cmd.

Today, I open a new gift to the homelab - an HP MicroServer Gen8. This little chonky cube is full of hard drives and not a whole lot else, making it a perfect test system for ZFS, TrueNAS, Proxmox VE and Proxmox Backup Server, etc. and I’m already planning the videos I want to make with it. So come along as I open it up and see roughly what’s inside, the specs, and use HP iLO (their proprietary IPMI) for the first time.

Casually tearing down the Dell Wyse 7010 (Zx0) that was kindly sent in by a viewer named Tom! Thanks Tom for making this happen. Tom also sent an HP thin client, but you guys only get one treat per video, and that one needed Torx bits that I didn’t have handy on the bench. tl;dr the CPU supports AMD-V (not that you really have enough RAM to think about virtualization, but you can expand it with ordinary DDR3 DIMMs), the GPU is kinda awful, and it has a Realtek NIC.

This is a continuation of my previous article on the Net Booted Thin Client. The instructions got way too long, so I created a new article for the client setup. You need a functional server setup (TFTP, HTTP, iPXE) which I did in my previous post. I could use something like Linux Terminal Server Project, but that’s a bit overkill for this, and I wanted to learn Alpine anyway, so I’ve chosen to use Alpine Linux for the client operating system.

Sometimes, projects don’t work. Today, I’m going to describe a bit about a few of them. Thank you for coming to my ted talk lol. I’ve been working on Linux Multiseat for awhile now, it’s a topic that has fascinated me for over a decade now. But, getting it to actually work with cheap hardware has eluded me. So, here’s a bit of an overview of what I’ve learned so far.

I previously setup a Proxmox high availability cluster on my $35 Dell Wyse 5060 thin clients. Now, I’m improving this cluster to make it hyperconverged. It’s a huge buzzword in the industry now, and basically, it combines storage and compute in the same nodes, with each node having some compute and some storage, and clustering both the storage and compute. In traditional clustering you have a storage system (SAN) and compute system (virtualization cluster / kubernetes / …), so merging the SAN into the compute nodes means all of the nodes are identical and network traffic is, in aggregate, going from all nodes to all nodes without a bottleneck between the compute and SAN nodes.

In this project, I explore using low cost thin clients as cluster nodes, the fundamentals of Proxmox clustering, redundant storage, and hyper-converged infrastructure using Proxmox and Ceph. Setting up a Proxmox HA Cluster In the first video, I take the Dell Wyse 5060 I bought before and … bought 2 more. Once I had 3, I built a complete high availability cluster using them, demonstrating the very basics of Proxmox clustering, high availability resources, and how Proxmox handles failure.

I’ve wanted to play with multi-WAN routing setups for awhile. I thought about buying Starlink, but it’s a bit pricey as a purely backup solution, and I’m in a situation where my primary internet is very reliable for about the same price. So I settled for LTE backup. I looked around for awhile, trying to decide what the right solution is for me. I really wanted to pass through the IPv4 address and IPv6 prefix from the ISP through to my OPNsense router, since I don’t want to deal with triple-NAT and dual layer firewall.

I’ve played with network booting before (and I even tried to netboot Windows, what a nightmare that was), but now I want to get serious about it. I want to netboot my VDI Clients. I’ve been working on a thin client series, and the next step is to get rid of the installation entirely. I could use something like Linux Terminal Server Project, but that’s a bit overkill for this, and I wanted to learn Alpine anyway, so I’ve chosen to use Alpine Linux for the client operating system.