ParkyTowers: Thin Clients Laid Bare | Hacker News Reader

ParkyTowers: Thin Clients Laid Bare

parkytowers.me.uk

60 pointstetris1128 comments

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

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...

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

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/

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.

If you look into the SunRay 3i you get 6W max power usage and 1080p screen. The software is available for Linux and Solaris if you can find it.

Ugh, my university was all-in on those in ~2004 or so.

They were super slow to login and get into Netscape during daytime hours.

Thankfully I could get to the command line faster and knew my way around Pine and Lynx for quick email and newspaper check.

I used a Raspberry Pi to do that for ages. All you need is Remmina and proper server setup: https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2022/10/23/1700

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 (40€) 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).

~ 9W running when off (?)

very common with flash based doodads. check out what cable tuners are drawing when 'off'.

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.

Now that Raspberry Pis are hard to find (in mid-2023), the Dell/Wyse 3290 makes a very nice print server for a reasonable price.

https://www.parkytowers.me.uk/thin/wyse/3030/

Certainly was the case but there's been plenty of Pi 4 for the past few weeks, and other models getting better now too. https://rpilocator.com

Although an old thin client might still be cheaper.

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.

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.

proxmox can support vdi infra

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

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.

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)

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...

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.

Rowan Ellis makes good videos. They're usually more serious than that one, though!

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.

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.

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.

What software do you run on your Apple TV?

What I'm missing in this (great) list: products from Shuttle [1]. Which is odd, because a Shuttle XPC seems to have been the author's very first thin client.

Some of the XPC slims are fanless, and the number of ports they come with is terrific.

[1] https://www.shuttle.eu/en/products/slim

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