[HN Gopher] ParkyTowers: Thin Clients Laid Bare
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ParkyTowers: Thin Clients Laid Bare
Author : tetris11
Score : 40 points
Date : 2023-08-14 16:44 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.parkytowers.me.uk)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.parkytowers.me.uk)
| kotaKat wrote:
| I just wish getting "good" VDI at a small scale to leverage a
| small fleet (say, 3-4) of thin clients was easy.
|
| VMware Horizon requires /massive/ amounts of resources on its own
| (something like 14-20 GB of RAM for the required services VMs
| alone), Citrix is a nightmare all its own, and I'm not sure how
| what else would work well out there.
| zamadatix wrote:
| The RDP based ones are pretty straightforward to get going
| without a massive base infrastructure. Even with the intended
| way of running Windows Server as the host you can easily have
| 3-4 clients run on one meager server with no need for a
| managing VMs at all, unless you really want to do it that way.
|
| On the Linux side I use persistent systemd-nspawn containers
| with bind mount access to the main storage. I suppose it's
| possible to do the same thing there, though I've never tried.
| whalesalad wrote:
| proxmox can support vdi infra
| rkeene2 wrote:
| I actually built this using my on-premises cloud platform in
| the past [0]. It was using Service Templates from OpenNebula,
| and would automatically scale the VMs based on number of users,
| setup the load balancer, acquire an TLS certificate, etc.
|
| Once you have OpenNebula running (which is really easy),
| developing the re-usable VDI system took me about a week.
|
| [0] https://rkeene.org/viewer/tmp/vdi-service-template.png.htm
| DrPhish wrote:
| I love repurposing thin clients.
|
| There were a few gens of HP thin clients that always seemed to
| have their mass storage devices die, and end up on eBay for
| peanuts.
|
| I picked up a handful of the 64-bit CPU ones and set them up to
| boot diskless with LibreELEC to act as Kodi stations for eg.
| media streaming and distributed video players on TVs on my
| network.
|
| They boot quickly enough to not need to think about them too
| much, and it was easy to NFS mount my media library from my main
| servers.
|
| Kodi controller apps from my phone and things like
| AirPlay/TuneBlade to cast arbitrary stuff to them has been a real
| quality of life improvement for my family.
| znpy wrote:
| I knew a guy that was able to save the local school tens of
| thousands of euros by rebuilding the computer lab with a single
| beefy computer and many (40?) of these thin clients by using
| linux and LTSP.
| joshstrange wrote:
| This is some of my favorite types of content on the interest. Not
| for profit, labor of love, sharing knowledge, evergreen.
|
| On of my favorite things to do on the internet is to add context
| or explain how I solved a problem to older "content". As in an
| old SO question, an abandoned Github issue, or, until recently,
| an old reddit post. I know that only a few people will see what I
| wrote but I know that they will benefit greatly from it (as
| normally it's something that's taken me anywhere from 30min to 8+
| hours to solve and I want to document it). I've typed the words
| "I hope this helps someone else" many times and it always leaves
| a smile on my face.
| [deleted]
| joshstrange wrote:
| If you were intrigued, like me, by the line:
|
| > These days the answer to that is simples (in Meerkat speak -
| possibly lost on those of you who don't see UK TV advertising).
|
| You can watch the commercial here (watch till the end):
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M0mXUC0cUPg
|
| (I assume there were multiple variants, I just found this one)
| TRiG_Ireland wrote:
| They're cultural icons. There's cultural analysis (are they
| gay?) [1] and fanfic (seriously!) [2].
|
| 1: https://youtu.be/7SUeWVEpgdY 2:
| https://archiveofourown.org/tags/comparethemarket*d*com%20%2...
| joshstrange wrote:
| Dear god. I'm halfway through the first video, of which I was
| _not_ going to watch all of due to the length, I was only
| going to watch a minute or two, cut to 11 minutes later and
| I've almost had to pause at how hard I am laughing. This is
| amazing and my life is better for knowing more about these
| hilarious commercials, the world building in them, and the
| impact of them that this video is represents. Pure gold.
| Thank you.
| nintendo1889 wrote:
| K-Meleon still runs well on older hardware (as well as Opera 12).
|
| The best upgrade for my old x86 hardware seems to be Haiku OS.
| The browser situation is getting better all the time. As the
| overall system becomes more stable, even the full-featured non-
| native QT-based browsers will be more stable as well.
|
| Other thoughts: nextcloud server running a single service
| (multiple nextcloud services will run like a dog on small
| hardware).
|
| TinyTinyRSS gateway/server (your own google reader).
|
| Text only usenet caching server via gmane.io and the other
| servers like sdf.org.
|
| SSH / VPN gateway.
|
| I have the first gen Apple TV and it makes for a great streaming
| server and networked stereo system.
| znpy wrote:
| I run nextcloud on a thin client, but i mist admit it's not
| that "thin" actually.
|
| It's the fujitsu esprimo q920 (iirc) and it features a 4th gen
| core i5 (4c/4t) and 16gb ram. It's been working fairly well for
| the last ~3 years.
| thunfisch wrote:
| Wow, this one brings back memories.
|
| I've ran one of the
| https://www.parkytowers.me.uk/thin/wyse/z/z90d7/ for some years
| as a cheap (40EUR) homeserver and then later as a break-music-
| playback-machine for concerts with spotifyd.
|
| And over 10 years ago I had one of the
| https://www.parkytowers.me.uk/thin/EvoT20/ to play around with. I
| never really got that one working in a meaningful way though.
|
| Both times this page helped out a lot with technical details!
| Nice to see it on here. A treasure trove of hacking starting
| points to repurpose quite slow, but still useful hardware (and
| saving it from a landfill).
| tetris11 wrote:
| ~ 9W running when off (?)
| jabroni_salad wrote:
| very common with flash based doodads. check out what cable
| tuners are drawing when 'off'.
| res0nat0r wrote:
| Company I used to work at had a handful of Sun Ray's which all
| connected to either an 880 or 6800 in our datacenters if I
| remember correctly. I always thought they were really cool. I'd
| love to have something like this for my current setup as I have a
| large PC with tons of cords and crap all over the place at my
| desk. Something nice and small but connecting to hardware in the
| closet where all that mess is hidden would be nice.
|
| https://www.parkytowers.me.uk/thin/sun/SunRay1/
|
| https://www.spectra.com/sun/used-systems/193/sunfire-v890.ht...
|
| http://www.anysystem.com/sunfire-6800-special-1.html
| aidenn0 wrote:
| With two CAT-6 cables, you can run HDMI and USB-2 (to a hub for
| keyboard/mouse) a fairly long distance with the right
| extenders:
|
| (Note that one reason the HDMI costs $300 is that it does not
| compress the video; the $30 ones you can find have much longer
| range, but will use compression).
|
| 1: https://www.pulse-eight.com/p/185/neolite-hdmi-extender-set
|
| 2: https://www.amazon.com/Monoprice-Extender-
| CAT5E-Connection-1...
| chrchr wrote:
| There are also some super long fiber optic Thunderbolt 3
| cables on the market, though like the HDMI-over-cat-6
| solution, they are not cheap:
|
| Optical Cables by Corning Thunderbolt 3 USB Type-C Male
| Optical Cable, 50m https://a.co/d/beERef6
| aidenn0 wrote:
| Looking at that found this item, which seems to cheap to be
| good (under $100 for 8k DP over fibre):
| https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0B4S3F5CK/
| kijiki wrote:
| I've been using this $32 15m one for a few weeks:
| https://www.amazon.com/dp/B098QC6XWS
|
| It claims 8k60, but I've only used 4k60 though.
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(page generated 2023-08-14 23:01 UTC)