sj_zero

When I’m looking at thin clients for use in my systems, I look at a few different things:

1. Max RAM capacity
2. Max storage capacity (and method of expansion
3. CPU capability
4. Communication methods

It looks like the 5010s are the most interesting to start with. They seem to be expandable to 8GB of RAM. They seem to have a DOM plugged into a populated SATA port, so I’m thinking you might be able to use an extension cable to install a proper SATA SSD and have decent storage. The APU is AMD pre-ryzen which is horrible for most purposes but I’d say is quite interesting for homelab use. Get some memory and real storage in them, and they’re good enough to be basically fully powered servers for whatever you want. Being suck on USB 2.0 means you’re pretty limited in that front. With upgraded memory and storage, you’re basically looking at something you can integrate into a proxmox cluster easily.

The 3040s are a bigger challenge. Limited memory (2GB soldered), very limited storage (8 or 16GB), and no immediately apparent way to upgrade them. On the other hand, the USB 3.0 port on the front means you can use a USB SSD or HDD to increase storage. With such a device plugged in, the Intel Atom X4 quad-core isn’t a great CPU, but you can definitely do some limited fun things. As-is and without any mods, I’m thinking you could host game servers on these for older games without overtaxing them too much, or fun niche applications like gemini hosting or telnet.

This really seems like an AI generated article to, in a very complicated way, describe of what was until fairly recently just the status quo.

Until fairly recently, if you had network attached storage you could just play the media off of the network storage. That’s just how it worked. People playing media through the command line is something people have been doing for decades. What happened later was the introduction of services like jellyfin that would streamline the process.

Overall, other than the extremely hyperbolic language promising to completely change your life by letting you do things the way that they were done decades ago, it reads like “you may not like cars, but let me introduce you to an amazing new technology known as walking” presented without any irony.

Well, let me tell you a story.

Recently I needed to use BitTorrent to download a very large file from an independent project. Usually I can just use my web browser, but this one was in the hundreds of gigabytes there just was no way.

So I installed the original official bittorrent client, because I’m really out of the game I haven’t torn today anything outside of my browser in years now.

I had to pay close attention to not install multiple pieces of unwanted software. I had to uncheck a bunch of stuff and carefully navigate the installer. Even after that, the client was junk and constantly showed multiple videos ads at all times, and besides that it just didn’t have the horsepower to download my torrent for me.

I remembered using transmission on Linux so I decided to try getting that instead, turns out it had a Windows version.

Downloaded, ran the executable, pressed next three times, opened up the torrent file, pointed to my existing download hoping it’d figure out what parts the file needed and in fact it did and the download was done quickly.

If I had failed to uncheck any of the boxes, I guess you could call me stupid for non-un checking them, but to me it seems a lot simpler using the FOSS products that never had any checkboxes to uncheck in the first place.

Meanwhile, and honestly I didn’t use Plex very much because it just didn’t seem like a very good product, but I also seem to remember I kept on ending up on the plex.net website instead of my own server. I think it was something along lines of if you go in to change certain settings it’ll change domains on you? Either way, it was just not very well set up compared to Jellyfin, which had everything that I was using right there I never even remotely tried to send me somewhere else.

Zero with jellyfin.

By default for me it seems to really want me to get off of my server altogether and get onto their servers, and it seems to really want to get me off of my media and onto their half-baked streaming service.

Really complex compared to just having my media show up.

I’m using proxmox now with lots of lxc containers. Prior to that, I used bare metal.

VMs were never really an option for me because the overhead is too high for the low power machines I use – my entire empire of dirt doesn’t have any fans, it’s all fanless PCs. More reliable, less noise, less energy, but less power to throw at things.

Stuff like docker I didn’t like because it never really felt like I was in control of my own system. I was downloading a thing someone else made and it really wasn’t intended for tinkering or anything. You aren’t supposed to build from source in docker as far as I can tell.

The nice thing about proxmox’s lxc implementation is I can hop in and change things or fix things as I desire. It’s all very intuitive, and I can still separate things out and run them where I want to, and not have to worry about keeping 15 different services running on the same version of whatever common services are required.

Honestly, I lowkey hated plex when I was using it. We never used it because it wasn’t very good at the one thing it was supposed to be fore.

It was trying so hard to get me to use their media, when what I wanted was to watch my media. By contrast, jellyfin just shows me my media.

If you have a few bucks, the chromecast with android TV is what I’d recommend. The jellyfin app for android TV looks and works great – as good as any paid streaming service imo. I got my wife using it daily, and she’s not a tech person at all.

Since calendar is an app, but fundamental email service isn’t, one thing that I found is that apps can interact in ways that are completely unintuitive.

For example, I activated the ncdownloader app, and it caused mail to stop showing emails, or I activated nextcloud music and it stopped nextcloud news from updating.

You should check your logs, because usually when there’s a problem it will show up in there. The logs I’m referring to are in your administrator panel. It will be completely unintuitive as to what exactly is going on. The other thing that you can do is just pay attention to which apps you’ve installed, and if there are any that are a little bit unusual, just try to disabling them and seeing if calendar mail works after that.

I personally used 7digital to rebuild my music collection. They sell good licensed mp3s.

I have absolutely nothing negative to say about them. The prices were decent, the files are boring DRM free MP3s, and they had a really good selection of music.

Honestly it looks almost exactly the same as when I used it for the first time like 15 years ago.

IMO, AI is a really good demo for a lot of people, but once you start using it, the gains you can get from it end up being somewhat minimal without doing some serious work.

Reminds me of 10 other technologies that if you didn’t get in the world was going to end but ended up more niche than you’d expect.

I didn’t like synapse or dendrite at all, but conduit has been great.

I moved to Proxmox a while back and it was a big upgrade for my setup.

I do not use VMs for most of my services. Instead, I run LXC containers. They are lighter and perfect for individual services. To set one up, you need to download a template for an operating system. You can do this right from the Proxmox web interface. Go to the storage that supports LXC templates and click the Download Templates button in the top right corner. Pick something like Debian or Ubuntu. Once the template is downloaded, you can create a new container using it.

The difference between VMs and LXC containers is important. A VM emulates an entire computer, including its own virtual hardware and kernel. This gives you full isolation and lets you run completely different operating systems such as Windows or BSD, but it comes with a heavier resource load. An LXC container just isolates a Linux environment while running on the host system’s kernel. This makes containers much faster and more efficient, but they can only run Linux. Each container can also have its own IP address and act like a separate machine on your network.

I tend to keep all my services in lxc containers, and I run one VM which I use for a jump box I can hop into if need be. It’s a pain getting x11 working in a container, so the VM makes more sense.

Before you start creating containers, you will probably need to create a storage pool. I named mine AIDS because I am an edgelord, but you can use a sensible name like pool0 or data.

Make sure you check the Start at boot option for any container or VM you want to come online automatically after a reboot or power outage. If you forget this step, your services will stay offline until you manually start them.

Expanding your storage with an external SSD works well for smaller setups. Longer term, you may want to use a NAS with fast network access. That lets you store your drive images centrally and, if you ever run multiple Proxmox servers, configure hot standby so one server can take over if another fails.

I do not use hot standby myself. My approach is to keep files stored locally, then back them up to my NAS. The NAS in turn performs routine backups to an external drive. This gives me three copies of all my important files, which is a solid backup strategy.

I set up everything I use “bare metal” or at least in an lxc container I directly build and maintain, but most people don’t. Makes a lot of sense, to be honest. A lot of prepackaged software uses databases and nobody has to care exactly what it’s up to.

One of many books that I’m working on behind the scenes is a programming book that is going to be for the free basic programming language, but is also intended to be a history of computing and a broader computer science course. One of the recurring jokes I intend to put into the computer history is “that would be the only time Microsoft did something sketchy”

Their very first action ever was to announce that they had an Altair compatible basic ready to go. And it turns out that even that was a complete lie. They only bothered actually making the basic interpreter once it became obvious there was demand based on the feedback from the magazine letter.

I was about to do the same, had the USB stick prepared and everything, then I tried proxmox. Just lucked out.

I moved to proxmox earlier this year and it quickly became a huge deal for me.

One nice thing is that I can easily create lxc containers for each service that has exactly what that service needs. Each service lives in a container that acts a lot like bare metal.

A second nice thing is it’s really easy to administer everything remotely. All your machines end up accessible through the proxmox interface, and you can hop into virtual machines or lxc containers via the web.

A third thing is you can easily handle hot standby and backups through an easy UI.

Totally changed the game for me.

I was going to say “I don’t use em-dashes in my books for when they sole all those books” but then I went into my first book and found 22 em-dashes so… oops. I thought the word processor changed – into an en-dash and not an em-dash.

I think you’d probably be ok with using em-dashes (I typically use en-dashes myself but I’m lazy), but don’t use cliche phrases like “It’s not [x] – it’s [reframed x]”

“This is not just a leak – it’s a blueprint for mass exploitation,” the researchers said.

Are the researchers chatgpt? Because that looks almost word for word how chatgpt would write something like that, right down to the em-dash.

I had to do it for my atom d2550s because of the odd hybrid x86/x86-64 systems they are. I had to install what ended up being linux mint debian edition 5 because that was the best way to get an OS on the odd bootloader system for various reasons, then upgraded to 6 to get to the latest debian, then I installed proxmox and removed all the debian stuff.

What do I do with something as weak as a pair of D2550s? Don’t you worry about that. I’ve found uses for both. :P

It’s an unusual use case, but it’s one reason you might need to install debian before proxmox.