So I bought some thin clients some time ago, 11 of them actually. Having this many of anything is liberating and dangerous, just imagine what you can make of it!

The original plan was to setup a kubernetes cluster to learn, both for personal enjoyment and for $DAYJOB, but setting it up took 20 minutes using Ansible (after finding a space to place it, configuring a switch & firewall, making new patch cables, cable management…) and left a few machines as well.

Now these machines are hammers, looking for anything but nails to hammer in. My pihole broke – replaced with a thin client! My firewall/router has been unstable a few times – it can be replaced by a thin client as well! Distributed storage needed – you can now make the worst performing Ceph cluster ever!!!

Performance wise they are terrible, barely any better than a Raspberry Pi 4B. But that doesn't matter – RPi4s are typically more than enough! These machines are also much cheaper RPi4B even before the global shortage, plus it includes storage (8 GB!), PSU and a chassis. I paid ~25 EUR each for the machines.

The thin clients are Fujitsu FUTRO S920, with an AMD G-Series GX-222GC (dual core) and 4 GB of RAM. A colleague donated 40 GB of SO-DIMMs so nearly all of them are equipped with 8 GB of RAM.

It will be glorious <3