I’ve wanted to play with multi-WAN routing setups for awhile. I thought about buying Starlink, but it’s a bit pricey as a purely backup solution, and I’m in a situation where my primary internet is very reliable for about the same price. So I settled for LTE backup. I looked around for awhile, trying to decide what the right solution is for me. I really wanted to pass through the IPv4 address and IPv6 prefix from the ISP through to my OPNsense router, since I don’t want to deal with triple-NAT and dual layer firewall.

I’ve played with network booting before (and I even tried to netboot Windows, what a nightmare that was), but now I want to get serious about it. I want to netboot my VDI Clients. I’ve been working on a thin client series, and the next step is to get rid of the installation entirely. I could use something like Linux Terminal Server Project, but that’s a bit overkill for this, and I wanted to learn Alpine anyway, so I’ve chosen to use Alpine Linux for the client operating system.

I’ve been using Linux for a long time. The first distribution I ever installed was Ubuntu 6.06 ‘Dapper Drake’, on which I ran a phpBB server for my school friends. Security was poor. But shortly after, as I learned about Linux desktops (and first daily-drove a Linux laptop around 2012), I learned about ‘Multiseat’. The Wikipedia article has a cool picture of a very 90s looking desktop tower with 4x CRT monitors, and that image was published to Wikipedia in 2005, and I saw it in middle/high school years.

So you want to turn your one or two Proxmox nodes into a small Proxmox cluster? What do you need to know about quorum, especially as it pertains to really small clusters of 2 and 3 nodes? In this video, I go over the different ways to stabilize a 2-node cluster for high availability, the storage requirements for high available VMs, installing a QDevice using a Raspberry Pi, and if you even need one.

I recently tried to install Proxmox on my Dell Wyse 3040 thin client so it can act as a cluster member, since it’s arguably easier to setup a full Proxmox install on x64 based devices than it is to setup a QDevice. Proxmox has a great installer, you have the full GUI to manage the node (not that you need to do much with it as a QDevice), and you have the option of setting it up for other Proxmox services and containers even if it’s really not very capable.

For my last trick, I setup a multi-user thin client where each user account was connected to a specific virtual machine. This is great, but if you have a lot of thin clients you might not want to create a ton of VMs and might instead want each user in the system to have one or more VMs. Well, Josh Patten has written a Python-based GUI to select thin clients which you have access to, and today we are going to turn that into an appliance on both a Raspberry Pi and an actual x86 based Thin Client (running Debian).

After really enjoying my trio of Dell Wyse 5060 Thin Clients, I bought another cheap one to see how it compares, and hopefully to give advice to the many commenters. The 5060 was a great value for $35 but it’s hard to find at that price normally, while the 3040 is always available for that price, physically much smaller, and also worse on paper. It has a quad-core Intel CPU, 2G of RAM, and was advertised as having an 8G SSD but mine is actually 16G.

I’ve made many videos on Thin Clients before, all of them relying on Proxmox and the SPICE protocol. This works well when you control both the client and the hypervisor, and allows a lot of flexibility in the guest OS at the expense of flexibility at the client. If you want to rely on a remote access / Bring-Your-Own-Device type solution, you probably care more about solid multi-platform client support than flexibility in mixing VM OSes and running with no software installation on the VM.

Of all of the doors in a normal US McMansion, the garage doors are the biggest, and are almost always motorized. This means they are an easy target for automation, since most of the hardware is already there, we just need to bridge it to the virtual space. The cheapest way to do this is to use a door contact switch and dry contact relay which are compatible with Home Assistant, and some YAML magic to bridge them together.

Today I got my first upgrade to the studio setup: A new microphone! I chose a Rode Videomic Go II, which has USB-C and 3.5mm outputs, and they have a USB-C to Lightning cable available to connect to my phone. Since I use my iPhone for filming (often my older iPhone SE), this was important to me, but the ability to connect digitally to my desktop for recording screen capture with high quality audio was also important, so I didn’t want to get the smaller mics that clip directly on to the phone’s lightning port.