room heater

I had 15 of the 2013-era 5010 thin clients. Most of them have had their SSDs and RAM upgraded.

They’ve worn many hats since I’ve had them, but some of their uses and proposed uses were:

1. I did a 15 node Docker Swarm setup and used that to both run some of my applications as well as learn how to do horizontal scaling.
2. After I tore down the Docker Swarm cluster, I set them up as diskless workstations to both learn how to do that and used them at a local event as web kiosks (basically just to have a bunch of stations people could use to fill out web based forms).
3. One of them was my router for a good while. Only replaced it in that role when I got symmetric gigabit fiber. Before that, I used VLANs to to run LAN and WAN over its single ethernet port since I had asymmetric 500 Mbps and never saturated the port.
4. Run small/lightweight applications in highly-available pairs/clusters
5. Use them to practice clustered services (Multi-master Galera/MariaDB, multi-master LDAP, CouchDB, etc)
6. Use them as Snapcast clients in each room
7. Add wireless cards, install OpenWRT, and make powerful access points for each room (can combine with the above and also be a Snapcast client)
8. Set them up as VPN tunnel endpoints, give them out to friends, and have a private network

Of the 15, I think I’m only actively using 4 nowadays. One is my MPD+Snapcast server, one is running HomeAssistant, ,the third is my backup LDAP server, and one runs my email server (really). The rest I just spin up as needed for various projects; I downsized my homelab and don’t have a lot of spare capacity for dev/test VMs these days, so these work great in place of that.

You could make the world’s worst computer cluster, that could be fun. I think there are several open source tools for doing clustering

I’d sell them. They don’t really have enough resources to run anything on their own, and I don’t have enough people in my household to justify setting up a bunch of terminals.

These are mini PCs right? So you want something with a room full of humans or some type of local online service. Anyway, not a purely computer project.

Library terminals and game room come to mind, but neither are for installing at home.

This could be funny if you have a d event computer, specially for od games

games-on-whales.github.io

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.

You can use the 3040 to build an AllStar node.