Regarding the m.2 slot - I didn't want to dwell on it in the video since I had nothing to put in there anyway, but I'd read that it was useless, and it's even more useless than I realized. Per (www.parkytowers.me.uk/thin/wyse/3040/storage.shtml) it has no PCIe lanes and no USB interface; it's an _SD port._ The only thing it supports is SDIO. I didn't even know this was possible, and I hate it tremendously.
Huh. weird. That hasn't been my experience. I had an older GeForce card working via an adapter and XP gaming was a blast. Then again, mine also didn't come with a BIOS password so perhaps it's somehow a different (or otherwise patched) model? It's definitely a 3040 with the same specs. weird...
I recently spent hours troubleshooting a machine that wouldn't turn on, only to finally realise that the power button didn't actually reach all the way to the power switch. So even if you fully depressed the power button on the case (which felt and sounded completely fine), the switch never made contact. It wasn't until I'd completely disassembled the machine for scrap that I realised this issue. So, don't feel bad, Gravis. You and your power button are not alone.
The first PC I built myself from the ground up (was a pentium something), imagine my dismay when it wouldn't power on. Turns out the power switch was faulty, which was simultaneously relieving and rage-inducing.
Thank you for bringing back the horrific memory of having to refresh and re-register 100's of these in the dell wyse console. The 3040's were flaming POS. They died constantly and struggled running Citrix. In office they worked ok, but due to covid, my company decided that giving them to home users was a good idea. These needed a vpn to connect, so each one was sent out with a cisco meraki z3. Then my company decided to switch from using a physical voip phones (running through the meraki) to a soft client phone. Let me tell you, that thin client and citrix session sh&t the bed the moment that phone system was used. Thankfully that was mostly the end of our thin client use outside of a couple specific use cases. Sadly, dell doesn't want to fix 3040s anymore but wanted them back. So we were stuck with hundreds in storage.
The Atom systems always looked so promising on paper, but in real usage they fell *quite* short. Having them in the fleet was a nightmare because they had weird bugs as wonderfully illustrated by the front USBs in the video. I think the onboard eMMC storage is what causes them to struggle so badly performance wise.
So to elaborate on some of the unknowns in the middle of the video, broker refers to the server in a virtual desktop environment that actually establishes the connections between a host and VDI machine. In Citrix, that would be the delivery controller, confusingly shortened to DC on occasion. Solutions like imprivata and I'm assuming the others mentioned in that other bit are single sign-on solutions for on-premises applications, offering rapid tap-in solutions. And you would surmise correctly that they are often used in hospitals to allow staff to access machines. Remote desktops are particularly useful in a hospital environment because nurses may be going from room to room and not have a mobile cart dedicated to them to work from, especially if they are not doing medication passthroughs.
@@alexthemorgan Very much true. In my somewhat limited but useful experience in the healthcare industry, EMRs tend to be hosted on isolated infrastructure that have trusted access created from the healthcare environment into the EMR ecosystem.
Since this little guy uses the same design language as the bigger desktop dells, I now have a strong desire to make a little scale dell LCD to go on top of it, miniatures of mediocracy
Greetings! Intel Atom collector, tinkerer, and custom builder here! Neat video on the Del Wyse 3040. I have one in my collection and absolutely love it. A few tips to keep in mind: 1. I have successfully installed Windows XP onto this machine. The BIOS (at least on the model I have) was not only without a password but was also fully unlocked (perhaps yours is as well), allowing me to change a surprising amount of settings. In this way I was able to attach an external CD and boot off of original installation media and... it just worked. Might be fun to have a go! 2. I installed Linux Mint onto the system (along with a few other distros)... yeah it does take some configuring. The big problem is that a lot of distros are looking for ~10GB of space or more to install the OS. There are very lightweight distros that should install just fine (such as Pop!OS) but for Mint I had better luck on 19.3 XFCE (which by the way runs a LOT lighter than even the most lightweight "modern" distros out there and is still 100% usable despite losing support in April 2023. Highly recommend especially on the much-older single-core 32-bit-only Atom processors of the 2009 netbooks). 3. Did you know that the BIOS has an option to switch from integrated to dedicated graphics? If you're confused about where those graphics would come from... M.2 slot. Yes, it "just works" with an adapter, and by golly is it glorious! Coupled with XP I was able to add in a GeForce 9500GT (a low-profile single-slot GPU from the time period) and have an absolute blast on my super-tiny retro gaming PC :D 4. Setting this up as a retro emulation box is also something I've done. from my experience it runs pretty well! The quad core chip is kind of a perfect little device for retro gaming and the lack of system RAM isn't nearly as big of a deal when it comes to running PS2 / Gamecube / Dreamcast games (never did try PS3 / Xbox 360 / Wii or higher; I suspect it will not be a fun time but who knows). Hopefully these thoughts and suggestions help! Feel free to reach out if you ever have any issues.
@@aprofondir For sure. I know it works really well as a MAME arcade system, and since it takes 5V, consumes very little power, has multiple USB interfaces, and is entirely passively-cooled, it's perfect for that use case (I have ambitions to make a portable handheld using one of these, since they are so affordable and ubiquitous).
@@BrunodeSouzaLino Yeah for sure. I just like Mint and find it a good "Windows alternative" if you want Windows on this machine but can't get it (plus my personal experience is that 19.3 XFCE runs like a top on really weak hardware).
Just want to say that I loved the joke of playing the "let's ask the internet" jingle in reverse. Your videos are chock-full of little touches like that I am _here_ for them.
Yeah Dells of this era not having a power LED that you could actually see was A Thing. I repair Dells for a living and there were many times I had to explain to a client that their machines were running fine; there was a light back there and everything, it was just nearly impossible to see in any kind of office environment.
Since we have Dell stuff at work with the same looking power switch and light, and I have no trouble seeing that, I assumed the semitransparent plastic on his might have become opaque from age. But... His was made in 2018?
The UEFI implementation on this thing is kinda scuffed, it uses the fallback boot record location, so after you finish installing Debian, you need to boot into a live USB, mount the filesystem and screw with the boot.efi file locations for the BIOS to notice it. Also the M.2 slot is slightly cursed in that its only wired for SDIO, so apart from comically overpriced industrial grade WiFi cards, there's not much you can plug in. Although someone has designed a M.2 card which lets you install a MicroSD card. Some dude also did some BGA rework on the eMMC storage and upgraded the thing to 64GB. He got Windows 10 running on it.
Can't you do it like in a normal contemporary Dell? After formatting our school lab and deleting the massive mess of UEFI boot entries that prior departments had done, the PCs were only picking up the Windows bootloader. So all I did was just add a new boot entry on the PC itself pointing directly to the GRUB EFI file, gave it priority, and now the PCs work just fine.
Honestly, I'm still annoyed at Debian for not just installing a BOOTx64.EFI when there is no other as a fallback option, as seemingly most other OSes do. Then it wouldn't even matter on edge cases like these as much as it does
You can actually make Grub boot up Debian without having to screw with the EFI files! You have to launch the expert install and then tell Grub to look for all partitions and also detect removable devices.
I love those Wyse 3040s, got one running for the last 170 days with a USB 3.0 SSD as my network monitor to send alerts when something else on the network dies and with the single digit idle power consumption, it's perfect for such single, small and specific tasks!
Reading your comment just reminded me that I need to setup some sort of network monitor (as a toy to play with, the most serious thing I do is my 220TB Plex server shared with two handfuls of users). Someone recommend a decent, Linux compatible netmon, please?
You know what? I was just thinking about that! I've already bought two RPis and both crash for no apparent reason (they just get off the network and hang like 5 minutes later), I know it must be something about the PSU, but a real computer is usually WAY more resilient.
@@TuxraGamer Check your storage as well, a while ago I had to reflash the SD card on my workplace Octopi, it just died very dead out of nowhere. Kinda predicting this, I had a few weeks before made a full disk image of it. Definitely glad I did it, I'm never gonna configure that internal serial port again on a freaking Orangepi Zero 2.
@Kalvinjj Thanks for your help! Yup, I tried that because I got a used Pi 3 with a used cheap Kingston 16 GB microSD and then I bought a new Samsung EVO 64 GB microSD and a brand new Pi 4, tried all combinations of these and had the same experience. I really have no clue about what could it be other than the extremely noisy 220v input in my region.
The CMOS reset by pressing on the chassis reminds me of the Cisco whoopsie where a Cisco 3750x could be reset by the protective boot on the Ethernet cable in port 1.
In the banking industry we used thin clients in all public facing areas for regulatory compliance. They are stateless. If someone decided to grab one and run out they wouldn't get anyone's financial data.
I am all over this dang series, my dream was always to throw a nuc on the bottom of my desk and i can just carry it back and forth home whenever i drive the 10 hours north. Alas, it was never meant to be(nucs ALMOST got good enough to replace pcs but then they fumbled the bag)
As someone who used to have to support a thin-client environment, screw thin clients with the heat of a thousand suns. I will never support an environment like that again.
Bingo, you've nailed it with the healthcare use. While I haven't seen many of these around (they were briefly trialed in my network), Wyse 5070 thin clients and other various models are used heavily, especially on the Capsa healthcare carts nurses wheel around the units where most everything is ran through virtualization!
I suspect the reason that the OS was so bespoke and locked down is because they were being used in healthcare, and they had to comply with a lot of certifications. Most importantly security restrictions since the machines would be displaying a lot of medical (and thus privacy sensitive) information. You don't want anyone to throw a custom OS on there and steal a bunch of patient data. And the more certifications you need, the simpler the software will be because every line of code is going to be under scrutiny. That's why computers in aviation are still archaic by modern standards.
anything that is in publicly accessible spaces and holds company or customer data should be as locked down as possible. thin clients also have the advantage of low power consumption which makes them ideal for mobile computer carts at hospitals, etc.
Transparent acrylics fade opaque over time. A combination of "they tuned it to block most of it", then the previous user left it by a window in direct light for a few years.
I've never heard of acrylic becoming *opaque* - brittle and a little milky, sure; also why would they use acrylic here? The case looks like ABS, so the transparent insert is most likely, y'know, ABS, no?
I worked for a company and we deployed around 600 HP T610 thin clients, and they did indeed use a VERY done up Linux based OS that had default things like integrated Citrix clients.
Hi there CRD, your AV tech videos brought me to your channel, best videos I’ve found! ThinOS is indeed a Linux platform. I take care of the Linux client for Parallels RAS (remote app solution) and ThinOS was one of our active targets. This was before I joined but I can definitely confirm its Linux roots. Keep up the good work!
Looking at one of the firmware update files (Add ThinOS 2402 (9.5.1079) Merlin Image file for Dell Wyse 3040) it actually seems to be FreeBSD 12.0 based! But there seems to have been a 'ThinLinux' used before that. part1Image1.img is a gz-compressed GPT partition table. In the first partition you'll find dtos/boot/{env.rc,kernel,ramdisk} which are unmistakingly FreeBSD bits and bobs. The first stage EFI bootloader seems custom, though. It seems to verify the integrity of the second stage bootloader, kernel, ramdisk, etc, then it probably just jumps into the bootloader. Ie. it mostly seems to function as a secure boot shim.
For a moment, I was expecting the issue to be the same problem that This Does Not Compute diagnosed in "Wait...THAT'S what was wrong with my rare Mac clone?!"... cracked solder joints.
These things are more useful than you realize. Since the CPU is an Intel Atom x5-z8350 quad core and the computer has 2gb RAM and an 8gb EMMC on board, you can install either a very lightweight linux distro on it, or you can do like I did, and install Lakka on it, which is a front-end for Retro- arch. I've got two controllers hooked up to it, and it functions remarkably well as a mufti system game console. I can play NES, SNES, N64, Genesis, MAME, Playstation, etc.. on it super smooth.
According to a Wyse pamphlet of a German enterprise hardware retailer, ThinOS is based on BSD, and it even explicitly states that it's _not_ Linux-based.
I have it on very good authority that the vast majority of these were used in "Medical" and/or "Hospital" settings, where it would be on a stand up rolling cart, along with a USB scanner/RFID reader, key/mouse, a display port monitor, and a big battery to make it not top heavy. And then it would do exactly what you said it would do: Be remoted into a computer playing a bunch of computers playing other computers.
When I was doing Hardware install runs for one of my local hospital networks for EPIC deployment Dell WYSE thin Clients were what EPIC certified for office deployment and a card scanner was attached via USB and at boot it automatically ran a script to remote to a windows server login screen where the staff could login
Glad I dodged that bullet. I was researching them as a compact, energy efficient, and cheap PC for my daughter to do her schoolwork on. This was one I looked at. Ultimately I went with a 5060, which had an internal 8gb SATA SSD, which I swapped out for a 256gb bare board. I dropped in an additional 8gb ddr3, totalling 12. And added a wifi adapter to the functional m.2 slot. All for less than $100. And installed Linux mint. Works fine.
@@justdaddy as low powered as the PC is, starting as a thin client, I figured give it every bit of help it can get. Windows is quite heavy and bloated. Linux is pretty lightweight and efficient. Mint Mate flavor being especially similar to windows in interface means she can easily navigate it after being used to windows. And nothing she needs is exclusive to run in windows. Runs really well for a $100 PC.
A very important thing to mention about the M.2 Slot is that it in fact does NOT support PCIe! It only has SDIO available, which the original Wifi+BT combo card uses.
wait. hang on. this is new to me - are you saying that this machine takes wifi cards that aren't PCIe, and aren't USB (as supported by the lanes in many/most PCIe slots) but are actually using the weird protocol used by those network cards that plug into SD slots?
@@CathodeRayDudeExcactly yeah :) M.2 has support for SDIO and thats what Dell put in here. Theres a site dedicated to documenting Thin clients called Parkytowers and they even publish details about getting in more storage trough the use of an SD-Card adapter
@@CathodeRayDudeExcactly yeah. M.2 allows for the use of SDIO and thats what they used. Look up "parkytowers wyse 3040" for a great writeup of the 3040 and more devices like it
@@CathodeRayDude I see you already wrote a pinned comment and found what I tried to link you to, for some reason youtube kept eating my comment so I wrote you a mail haha
@@CathodeRayDudeAlmost all x86 atom tablets that were semi-popular a few years ago did that exact thing, just with the wifi soldered to the board instead of on M.2. That's what the SoC in this Wyse was originally designed for.
Fujitsu Siemens made some half decent thin clients for a while, which had SO-DIMM ram and better SSD expandability. People which only needed a simple office machine were able to use them as a standalone PC: They also made decent microservers and console emulation boxes.
Duuuuuude the computers at my old job ran ThinOS and connected to Windows! That shit was the bane of my existence, good thing the only software we really ran was some ancient thing called L4X.
This is actually a pretty cool video. I've worked in IT for more than 35 years, and for at least that long, I've been aware of people who have sought ways to unshackle vertical-market devices from their built-in limitations (like the CueCat scanner from the 1990s), find new uses for things that have outlived their purposes (like plain vanilla Palm OS organizers), and giving purpose to devices that were pretty much useless right out of the gate. While the practicality of such projects varies, thanks to the Internet, those who are inclined to breathe new life into such devices can readily look up what they can be used for and how to transform them. But being the first one to figure out how to transform a given device is always a process, and even with the Internet, we rarely get to see that process in motion. We also usually only can look up the successful transformations, which, I'm sure, are the minority of attempts; most people don't publish their failures. Thanks for sharing your process with us, CRD. The journey is inspirational and educational, even if you didn't reach the destination.
The Dell Wyse 5070 is actually a very good general PC that can be had for under $30 these days. They have M.2 for storage and are a great alternative to a raspberry pi for cheaper. I'm using a few of them for a Proxmox cluster.
After the housing crash in 2008 in US, gov't put in place strict regulations for financial market. Apparently a lot of financial info was being stored on local pc's, laptops, etc at these companies. So, part of the new regs was that all financial info had to be stored on secure servers, and employees could only thin client into the stuff via VM's and such. So, a huge chunk of the financial market suddenly shifted very quickly to thin-client computing. And then fintechs and financial companies came and went all the time, so these little things flooded the used market. I worked at a loan company for a short while, and they kept having issues with these things. IT guys walking around always had a spare 1 or 2 in their kit when wondering around. Someone would say "I'm having problems with my..." and they'd just unplug, swap it out, turn new one on. Good to go. These things were so cheap and disposable.
Deploying these to 500 call center clients was such a pain if you had monitors without displayports. The amount of time during COVID that I had to ship DP to DVI or DP to VGA adapters to call center users with these. Twice the shipping logistics.
One of my first jobs in the late 90’s was breaking down the components in a massive inventory of dumb terminals being phased out of use by Baptist Health in Miami, FL- at the time, I remember the exciting notion that computing was moving away from the archaic notion of a large, remote mainframe being accessed by stupid little nubs and towards a gleaming, fully featured desktop for every employee… …it’s nice to see that 25 years later, we’re correcting our terrible mistake and going back to what made sense!
That's a pretty neat little unit for what it is. I've got a couple of them running Debian 12 as Raspi replacements. Everything installs fine, but there is one BIOS quirk that looks for a directory in the boot partition. If it's not there, it just refuses to boot.. So I got around that by USB booting GRUB, kicking off the OS boot, and then add an empty freaking directory in the right place. Then everything functions perfectly, lol.
@@dant5464 Ah that's a good tip to make it a little more streamlined! Not that I reinstall the things on a daily basis. But still, haha! I'm thinking about using one as a little NAS to bring in my backpack, with a cable to run it off a USB powerbank, and an external SSD mounted as storage. It should do that better than a Raspi at least.
The dim power light is hilarious because I got my dad a Wyse 5070 as an HTPC and he had exactly the same complaint, he couldn't tell when it was on. He ended up getting a USB-powered flex light and effectively using that as the power LED.
Until very recently, the electronic meat wrappers I worked on all ran VXWorks! Hobart Access Wrappers with the EPCP-1 control console are Geodes inside running VXWorks off a CF card.
Have a number of these 3040's used as thin clients in secure areas and they have worked great.. Never had any issues with them doing what they are meant to do.
My bet is that unit has such a high hour count that the status LED is essentially burned out. I’ve only seen that on machines with a decade of constant run-time on them.
That's what I figured. This can be seen commonly on the scroll/num lock LED on constantly running keyboards. When you turn caps lock on, it's 10X as bright.
@@resneptacle I’ve deployed Dell machines of this era back when I worked in IT. Laptops, desktops, servers… When new, the raw LEDs on the PCB would be so bright that it would be painful to look at them directly. The one in the video is relatively dim, implying that the machine has tens of thousands of hours on it.
Hey, I have two of them! Just picked them up a few weeks ago for £19 a piece. One of them is running Homeassistant, and the other one is something whose hardware I'm planning to mess around with!
ThinOS really looks like a bespoke Unix-like operating system. The raw disk image starts with an ELF 32-bit LE SysV header that has weird values for padding, machine and executable type. The .pkg format looks custom, too.
The bespokeness of ThinOS comes from the Wyse heritage. That M.2 slot is solely for a custom WiFi card. My wife's work sent her home with that exact model when they went all-remote early in COVID. (With two Dell branded DisplayPort equipped monitors, of course.) It was pre-configured to VPN in to her work and connect to a Windows "desktop" over some flavor of Remote Desktop/Citrix/etc.
I remember when I worked in fast food that we had two of these that worked all of the order screens, one for the front, one for the back. But they cheaped out on the monitors so they had to use DP to VGA adapters, also had these PS/2 button pads (with a PS/2 to USB adapter of course) that were used to navigate around, along with booting up over the network. Good times.
Older Wyze thin clients ran Suse Enterprise, we had one at our DC and I ended up dumping the onboard image (Suse Ent 11) and converting it to a remote serial terminal. It had two serial ports! However, it was SLOWWWW. The stock image didn't come with any packages outside of your remote software and an old Firefox install. The os image was on an IDE DOM, and it was an archive used with overlay FS but no packages would be saved anyway. There was only 1G of disk space, so I assume they discarded everything that wasn't usernames/passwords or realm. Neat to see they still use 'fireport' as the BIOS password!
I really like the more relaxed atmosphere around the first part, where you're taking it apart. I think you did a great job segueing into getting back to explaining the specs. You did well with the off-the-cuff part of that. Definitely would look forward to more bits like that. :)
I have a few hundered of these at work I have supported for citrix RDP. They have a couple of quirks but are workhorses too. First: There is a 12v and a 5v model, the 5v one has a dim power light, the 12v one is bright. I always cup my hands around the WYSE to block all light then look through finger gaps to read the light. Hook up the 12v brick to the 5v model and you have a paperweight, and they use the same barrel connector! Second: On first power on, after power loss, they have monitor detect issues. They will flash an amber light a few times then turn off. Seems to be our DP to HDMI cables/adapters exacerbate these issues. The solution is to fully hook it up except hook no display to it, give it a minute, hit the power button, give it another 30secs (the light should change to white), then hook up the monitor. Then it will work unless power is removed, powering down or rebooting is fine. After mass power outages we get a ton of calls.
Yeah, they don't like some DP-HDMI adapters. But some others work without any issues. The worst part about this is that with the incompatible adapter they get stuck in an infinite loop and don't boot at all until it is removes
I just had a lightbulb moment as I saw the log window at 9:57 ! The plastics factory I used to work for used these as satellite units to connect to label printers and such via (I think) a Windows VM.
Love wyse terminals, they'd have a variety of Os sometimes wyse/thinos, but many times xp or win7 embedded those were the best to play with as a pentester's playground. You'd be autologged in as a local admin, just with the wyse file based write filter limiting your changes and no ability to turn it off but once you have broken out of the lockdown (cert install, open with, etc) you'd add an administrative user. Shutdown -l (log off, don't reboot) holding shift to prevent auto login. Log in as your new user and disable the FBWF. Boom, you've admin, on the underlying host. Install an implant. Enable the FBWF again. Reboot. Wait for someone to come along and use it, and you're in the wider network. Why the new user when you're already admin? Because there is a 'volatile profile' controlled by a registry key within HKLM. You could remove your user's sid from the key, or you could just add a new one.
Hey I used to manage these at work! Dells assumption is that you'll also be running a Wyse Management Server to handle the configuration of them. You setup some DNS stuff and then when you turn the Wyse client on it gets directed to the WMS and pulls down the configuration that you setup. They're pretty good little machines for just getting people connected to a vdi.
When I left the office I was working at we were in the beginning phases of replacing desktops with WYSE "terminals" and moving people over to VDI. We had bigger models and win10 got installed on them. They took about 5 minutes to start if you shut it off, and once you logged in all you could do was launch Edge to log into and launch your VDI session.
The Z8350 CERTAINLY supports more than 2GB of RAM. Own several with 4GB. I'm pretty sure I seen machines with 8GB? Oh and there are super minified Windows installers, Tiny10 1809 was some 2GB after installation with page file and hiberfile disabled?
@@Schule04 definitely Z8350. I've got a Fusion5 T90B+. Z8350, 4GB RAM and 64GB eMMC. There's versions of the Lenovo Miix 320 with 4GB of RAM too. There's versions of the Intel Compute Stick with the Z8350 and 8GB of RAM.
I got a great deal on a pack of thin clients from a bankruptcy auction once. They're great alternatives to Raspberry Pis for basic purposes, bascially any time you just need _An Computer_ to accomplish a task.
Not sure about this particular model, but many thin clients are popular with the vintage/retro gaming crowd. The processors may be pretty slow by today's standards, but they run FreeDOS and DOS-era (even some Windows era) games perfectly fine. The only catch is the sound card. Some of the sound chips that these use aren't fully compatible with the sound standards used back in the day (OPLx/Sound Blaster/etc.) So you'll either have sound that doesn't work at all (no music and/or digital sampled audio) or music that sounds wrong/weird/incorrect. Your mileage may vary.
There are very old thin clients which are usable as retro computers but can have a slightly weird or incomplete souncards. Starting from early-mid 2000s, any attempts at DOS compatible soundcards have died out and have been replaced by AC97 port of the chipset. To go along with Windows Vista, AC97 was extended into Azalia (HD Audio), which is mostly what we have until today. Well now Azalia is dying too, to be replaced by USB UAC2. But this computer would specifically have Azalia audio. On AC97 and Azalea, you can just use SBEMU or one of its forks.
@@Schule04 Does it have CSM? This wasn't the era when it started being dropped yet, it might just be baked in, though locking out MBR boot makes sense. For systems with CSM, any number of EFI bootloaders can chain boot DOS, rEFInd for example or maybe Clover and the likes.
13:51 My Dell's BIOS has text mode UI, which I think it is default UI provided by AMI given that one ASUS machine I had has similar looking UI. The menu at that screen looks similar, except mine displays those options inside a blue popup box.
Many of the cheaper machines have a normal BIOS. Basically all the Latitudes and Precisions have a the custom Dell BIOS. Although I will say my D800 (made in 2005 but introduced in 2003) has the older text-mode custom BIOS. I'm guessing the change to the current style probably started with the ~2007 models (like Gravis' favorite D420) as these models are 64 bit only.
MY guess is the LED on the board for the indicator is dying, it probably was bright enough to show at one point, have a case with a similar issue, HDD LED works fine, power LED is so dim it's almost unnoticeable
I actually thought about buying one of these as a “not a raspberry pi” but I’m so glad I went with HP Elitedesk ultra small form factor pcs. They’re about $100 give or take depending on generation but are actually great little PCs that come with all kinds of useful things like Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, real m.2 slots. I use a Ryzen one that supports a custom AMD GPU module for light gaming, and an Intel one for my home server.
I completely agree, I have no hands-on with those but a friend tells me they're great, and I have the Lenovo equivalent, the THinkcenter. Those are *perfectly* cromulent.
I used to go the route of Raspberry Pi but have also found that micro PCs work better. They're x86, faster, have upgradeable memory, faster SSD possibilities, and can be had for the same price or cheaper than what Raspberry Pis are sold for today. Plus, they stack so nicely and easy in the event you need a few for different things. ❤
Thing is that a microPC is still $50 for a 4th Gen, yes very capable but also _10 years old_ nowadays, and a 6th Gen is more like $70. Quite a jump from the sub-$20 price these can go for.
The power light being dim is a problem on old Dell machines. They've often been on such a long time that the LED has degraded to 50% or less of its original brightness. When that Wyse terminal was new, that LED would have been blindingly bright without the power button in front of it. It doesn't help that those LEDs are heavily overdriven, which causes them to degrade in a relatively short time span. I've seen them go dark after just 5 years. They can be replaced, I think they're 5050 package LED modules, but they're bi-color LEDs, which getting exact replacements for can be a headache.
I had to stop the video and comment right away when you pulled out the "worst keyboard you own". We use that exact keyboard on many of the machines at the place I work and I HATE THEM. The form factor is wonky and they have the worst membrane I've ever used. And the people at my work ABUSE them, they're dirty and falling apart. Glad to see I'm not alone.
I think we may need an additional theme and title card for “Let’s manually edit system files” 😸 Btw, at 15:30, not sure if I’m doing an overeager nerdsnipe here but you likely could have run `lsblk` to list the recognized block devices rather than visually scanning the contents of `/dev`.
For some reason, lsblk just fuzzes my visual receptors, I have a hard time parsing its output for reasons I can't explain. I use it frequently, just not for discovering what block devices are in the system. Maybe it's just leftover muscle memory from Red Hat (pre-enterprise) 5 though.
@@CathodeRayDude When you say that, I can immediately picture a visual-fogged version of its output in my mind. (same with netstat… sigh) So I sympathize pretty hard. I also put my faith in lsblk to sort the devices such that the ones I actually care about end up near the bottom of its output… even though it doesn’t promise to do this, and it will likely change this behavior one day… ( ´_ゝ`)
blkid is also useful because it shows detected filesystems on the partitions. IIRC lsblk doesn't show any info about the contents of a partition unless it's already mounted.
A Void Linux installation with XFCE will consume 4.3GB on disk. And it's not like Puppy or DSL, it's a full distro that one might run on a workstation.
I think it could run windows using Windows To Go, which is a cursed portable version of windows that runs off a USB drive. It wouldn't exactly be "installed" per se, but it would probably work.
I also have a couple of Intel Atom tablets. They do run, but the main issue is RAM. 4 GB feels okay, but Windows 10 just crawls with only 2 GB. You can view pictures or play an MP4 file, but opening a PDF will take a few minutes.
Love the way the Caps come down in your opening title-card, and IMO the easiest way to get Linux onto that thing (without getting your hands dirty) would be to write a boot-able image onto the eMMC from the installer's OS; it's even possible to write the download onto the drive without storing it intermediately. I don't know what image to recommend off the top of my head, VM images are pretty close to what we're looking for but could be missing drivers for real hardware and installation-media is ephemeral. You'd be looking for a "persistent" LiveUSB image.
I remember while working for a security company in the UK, the company would use tiny systems like that, the advantage was you could hibe them any where and had so many applications.
2:34 Those CMOS batteries are actually very easy to get replacements for. Just buy CR2032 batteries with soldering tags, cut the wires from the original battery and solder them onto the tags of the new one. Then wrap the new battery in electrical tape or a heat shrink tube similar to the original one, and you're good to go. I've done it many times on laptops using this style of battery, always works.
![Little Guys: Episode 3 [Lex Brik]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/X8jGQmSsmb0/mqdefault.jpg)
![Little Guys: Episode 3 [Lex Brik]](/img/tr.png)
![Little Guys: Episode 1 [Logic AU912]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/GQmj1P-DSoY/mqdefault.jpg)
Regarding the m.2 slot - I didn't want to dwell on it in the video since I had nothing to put in there anyway, but I'd read that it was useless, and it's even more useless than I realized. Per (www.parkytowers.me.uk/thin/wyse/3040/storage.shtml) it has no PCIe lanes and no USB interface; it's an _SD port._ The only thing it supports is SDIO. I didn't even know this was possible, and I hate it tremendously.
The idea of an M.2 slot hosting nothing but SDIO actually sounds charmingly odd to me. I'm not a normal person.
Huh. weird. That hasn't been my experience. I had an older GeForce card working via an adapter and XP gaming was a blast. Then again, mine also didn't come with a BIOS password so perhaps it's somehow a different (or otherwise patched) model? It's definitely a 3040 with the same specs. weird...
Huh, given that, I'm wondering how the person who ran into that Unicode issue planned to use it as a NAS.
@@claysweetser4106 I think a pair of spinning discs plugged in via USB would run at line speed on this thing TBH, should work fine I would think
Uh, Not line speed, but the maximum throughput of the drives, you know what I mean
Every one of us depressed IT people groaned the second we heard "Citrix".
*several hours of loading later*
This triggered some _unneccessary call center memories_
Used to work in customer service for a big company that used citrix. I shivered...
I don't even work in IT, and I still felt a disturbance in The Force.
whoof, aint it the truth
"let's ignore the internet" I love that this is only the second episode and we're already poking fun at the in-references
with the music playing backwards for the ultimate demonic subliminal message
9:40
I recently spent hours troubleshooting a machine that wouldn't turn on, only to finally realise that the power button didn't actually reach all the way to the power switch. So even if you fully depressed the power button on the case (which felt and sounded completely fine), the switch never made contact. It wasn't until I'd completely disassembled the machine for scrap that I realised this issue. So, don't feel bad, Gravis. You and your power button are not alone.
The first PC I built myself from the ground up (was a pentium something), imagine my dismay when it wouldn't power on. Turns out the power switch was faulty, which was simultaneously relieving and rage-inducing.
That's what I was thinking was happening with this little guy before he figured out the light situation.
The joy in my tiny heart when "let's ignore the Internet" also had its own leifmotif.
And it being "Let's ask the Internet" backwards.
Absolutely brilliant! And we're only in episode 2. What will the future hold?!
Thank you for bringing back the horrific memory of having to refresh and re-register 100's of these in the dell wyse console. The 3040's were flaming POS. They died constantly and struggled running Citrix. In office they worked ok, but due to covid, my company decided that giving them to home users was a good idea. These needed a vpn to connect, so each one was sent out with a cisco meraki z3. Then my company decided to switch from using a physical voip phones (running through the meraki) to a soft client phone. Let me tell you, that thin client and citrix session sh&t the bed the moment that phone system was used. Thankfully that was mostly the end of our thin client use outside of a couple specific use cases. Sadly, dell doesn't want to fix 3040s anymore but wanted them back. So we were stuck with hundreds in storage.
audio/video performance is ass in citrix, we could never get it to work acceptably
We had iGels and they were awful as well.
The Atom systems always looked so promising on paper, but in real usage they fell *quite* short. Having them in the fleet was a nightmare because they had weird bugs as wonderfully illustrated by the front USBs in the video.
I think the onboard eMMC storage is what causes them to struggle so badly performance wise.
@hattree haha dealt with those too when I did a contract for matress firm. Those things are their own personal piece of hell.
@@cheapskateaquatics7103 they were so bad at my company they went back to actual pc's. igels were the suck.
Christmas 2019, at work, we put three of these in the tree in the office. The Three Wyse Terminals.
So to elaborate on some of the unknowns in the middle of the video, broker refers to the server in a virtual desktop environment that actually establishes the connections between a host and VDI machine. In Citrix, that would be the delivery controller, confusingly shortened to DC on occasion. Solutions like imprivata and I'm assuming the others mentioned in that other bit are single sign-on solutions for on-premises applications, offering rapid tap-in solutions. And you would surmise correctly that they are often used in hospitals to allow staff to access machines. Remote desktops are particularly useful in a hospital environment because nurses may be going from room to room and not have a mobile cart dedicated to them to work from, especially if they are not doing medication passthroughs.
That and HIPPA is much easier to manage without pulling patient data to a local machine.
@@alexthemorgan Very much true. In my somewhat limited but useful experience in the healthcare industry, EMRs tend to be hosted on isolated infrastructure that have trusted access created from the healthcare environment into the EMR ecosystem.
"While we're waiting for this to fail...." That's a sign of real IT experience 🤣
I haven't laughed so hard in weeks. And cried, a little.
@@jxh02You got me there 😂
Smallest Atom you've ever seen? Gravis confirmed for not having seen a Intel Compute Stick. Now THAT... is a Little Guy.
It's the smallest one I've *personally* seen, as in, in person.
I had an Atom compute stick... it was great until one day it rebooted and never booted up again.
@@cromulence eMMC will do that do ya
@@CathodeRayDudeI’ll send you an Intel Compute Stick
@@Wingnut353 yep
"I'm a dude playing a dude, disguised as another dude you're getting a dell!"
I'm getting a Dell? Fuuuuuuu**k.
*sad npc dell noises*
Sad rpm noise from dell hdd
The dudes are emerging.
Duuuuuude.
Since this little guy uses the same design language as the bigger desktop dells, I now have a strong desire to make a little scale dell LCD to go on top of it, miniatures of mediocracy
oh my god that's adorable
Miniatures of Mediocrity sounds like it's related to D&D minis that are mid
Greetings! Intel Atom collector, tinkerer, and custom builder here! Neat video on the Del Wyse 3040. I have one in my collection and absolutely love it. A few tips to keep in mind:
1. I have successfully installed Windows XP onto this machine. The BIOS (at least on the model I have) was not only without a password but was also fully unlocked (perhaps yours is as well), allowing me to change a surprising amount of settings. In this way I was able to attach an external CD and boot off of original installation media and... it just worked. Might be fun to have a go!
2. I installed Linux Mint onto the system (along with a few other distros)... yeah it does take some configuring. The big problem is that a lot of distros are looking for ~10GB of space or more to install the OS. There are very lightweight distros that should install just fine (such as Pop!OS) but for Mint I had better luck on 19.3 XFCE (which by the way runs a LOT lighter than even the most lightweight "modern" distros out there and is still 100% usable despite losing support in April 2023. Highly recommend especially on the much-older single-core 32-bit-only Atom processors of the 2009 netbooks).
3. Did you know that the BIOS has an option to switch from integrated to dedicated graphics? If you're confused about where those graphics would come from... M.2 slot. Yes, it "just works" with an adapter, and by golly is it glorious! Coupled with XP I was able to add in a GeForce 9500GT (a low-profile single-slot GPU from the time period) and have an absolute blast on my super-tiny retro gaming PC :D
4. Setting this up as a retro emulation box is also something I've done. from my experience it runs pretty well! The quad core chip is kind of a perfect little device for retro gaming and the lack of system RAM isn't nearly as big of a deal when it comes to running PS2 / Gamecube / Dreamcast games (never did try PS3 / Xbox 360 / Wii or higher; I suspect it will not be a fun time but who knows).
Hopefully these thoughts and suggestions help! Feel free to reach out if you ever have any issues.
I imagine it could do well for Dosbuntu, for playing old PC games
Or install Arch or other distro you can pick the packages at install time like Debian?
@@aprofondir For sure. I know it works really well as a MAME arcade system, and since it takes 5V, consumes very little power, has multiple USB interfaces, and is entirely passively-cooled, it's perfect for that use case (I have ambitions to make a portable handheld using one of these, since they are so affordable and ubiquitous).
Do a video on it
@@BrunodeSouzaLino Yeah for sure. I just like Mint and find it a good "Windows alternative" if you want Windows on this machine but can't get it (plus my personal experience is that 19.3 XFCE runs like a top on really weak hardware).
Just want to say that I loved the joke of playing the "let's ask the internet" jingle in reverse. Your videos are chock-full of little touches like that I am _here_ for them.
Yeah Dells of this era not having a power LED that you could actually see was A Thing. I repair Dells for a living and there were many times I had to explain to a client that their machines were running fine; there was a light back there and everything, it was just nearly impossible to see in any kind of office environment.
Whenever I had to turn off the school labs, I had to do it in the dark with a flashlight in order to see if stuff was actually off or not.
The passive aggressive response to “blue LEDs are always eye-piercingly bright!”
Fine. Fixed.
Since we have Dell stuff at work with the same looking power switch and light, and I have no trouble seeing that, I assumed the semitransparent plastic on his might have become opaque from age. But... His was made in 2018?
The UEFI implementation on this thing is kinda scuffed, it uses the fallback boot record location, so after you finish installing Debian, you need to boot into a live USB, mount the filesystem and screw with the boot.efi file locations for the BIOS to notice it. Also the M.2 slot is slightly cursed in that its only wired for SDIO, so apart from comically overpriced industrial grade WiFi cards, there's not much you can plug in. Although someone has designed a M.2 card which lets you install a MicroSD card. Some dude also did some BGA rework on the eMMC storage and upgraded the thing to 64GB. He got Windows 10 running on it.
*flexes in windows 10 installation on 16gb flash w/updates
Can't you do it like in a normal contemporary Dell?
After formatting our school lab and deleting the massive mess of UEFI boot entries that prior departments had done, the PCs were only picking up the Windows bootloader. So all I did was just add a new boot entry on the PC itself pointing directly to the GRUB EFI file, gave it priority, and now the PCs work just fine.
The Debian expert mode installer has an option to install to the fallback path
Honestly, I'm still annoyed at Debian for not just installing a BOOTx64.EFI when there is no other as a fallback option, as seemingly most other OSes do. Then it wouldn't even matter on edge cases like these as much as it does
You can actually make Grub boot up Debian without having to screw with the EFI files! You have to launch the expert install and then tell Grub to look for all partitions and also detect removable devices.
I love those Wyse 3040s, got one running for the last 170 days with a USB 3.0 SSD as my network monitor to send alerts when something else on the network dies and with the single digit idle power consumption, it's perfect for such single, small and specific tasks!
Reading your comment just reminded me that I need to setup some sort of network monitor (as a toy to play with, the most serious thing I do is my 220TB Plex server shared with two handfuls of users).
Someone recommend a decent, Linux compatible netmon, please?
Librenms or nagios are both great, we use librenms for a few hundred devices at work pretty easy to setup. @@orangejjay
These things are phenomenal for using in place of a raspberry pi in the 3d print realm
yep run 4 printers off one. mine is slighty older, but is great
Also a good home assistant box
You know what? I was just thinking about that! I've already bought two RPis and both crash for no apparent reason (they just get off the network and hang like 5 minutes later), I know it must be something about the PSU, but a real computer is usually WAY more resilient.
@@TuxraGamer Check your storage as well, a while ago I had to reflash the SD card on my workplace Octopi, it just died very dead out of nowhere.
Kinda predicting this, I had a few weeks before made a full disk image of it. Definitely glad I did it, I'm never gonna configure that internal serial port again on a freaking Orangepi Zero 2.
@Kalvinjj Thanks for your help! Yup, I tried that because I got a used Pi 3 with a used cheap Kingston 16 GB microSD and then I bought a new Samsung EVO 64 GB microSD and a brand new Pi 4, tried all combinations of these and had the same experience. I really have no clue about what could it be other than the extremely noisy 220v input in my region.
The CMOS reset by pressing on the chassis reminds me of the Cisco whoopsie where a Cisco 3750x could be reset by the protective boot on the Ethernet cable in port 1.
In the banking industry we used thin clients in all public facing areas for regulatory compliance. They are stateless. If someone decided to grab one and run out they wouldn't get anyone's financial data.
🎶doo do doot doot doo dee doo🎵
I love how everyone goes vaguely Nixon whenever doing a "Business" accent
I am all over this dang series, my dream was always to throw a nuc on the bottom of my desk and i can just carry it back and forth home whenever i drive the 10 hours north. Alas, it was never meant to be(nucs ALMOST got good enough to replace pcs but then they fumbled the bag)
As someone who used to have to support a thin-client environment, screw thin clients with the heat of a thousand suns. I will never support an environment like that again.
words and phrases that give even entry level IT staff ptsd flashbacks:
thin client
mission critical web app
hp printer
citrix
@@trenchXspike Honestly, just "printer". HP is bad, but they all suck in their own ways. 🤣
@@trenchXspike HP JetDirect box 😬
maybe shitrix, but rdp is slick as hell
@@trenchXspike I have an HP LaserJet 4200 from 2002 in a home network environment. It prints most of the time.
Bingo, you've nailed it with the healthcare use.
While I haven't seen many of these around (they were briefly trialed in my network), Wyse 5070 thin clients and other various models are used heavily, especially on the Capsa healthcare carts nurses wheel around the units where most everything is ran through virtualization!
I suspect the reason that the OS was so bespoke and locked down is because they were being used in healthcare, and they had to comply with a lot of certifications. Most importantly security restrictions since the machines would be displaying a lot of medical (and thus privacy sensitive) information. You don't want anyone to throw a custom OS on there and steal a bunch of patient data.
And the more certifications you need, the simpler the software will be because every line of code is going to be under scrutiny. That's why computers in aviation are still archaic by modern standards.
anything that is in publicly accessible spaces and holds company or customer data should be as locked down as possible. thin clients also have the advantage of low power consumption which makes them ideal for mobile computer carts at hospitals, etc.
Transparent acrylics fade opaque over time. A combination of "they tuned it to block most of it", then the previous user left it by a window in direct light for a few years.
I've never heard of acrylic becoming *opaque* - brittle and a little milky, sure; also why would they use acrylic here? The case looks like ABS, so the transparent insert is most likely, y'know, ABS, no?
@@oiytd5wugho sure if you want it to be ABS it's ABS champ
@@JH-pe3ro what does this mean
In any case, the machine was only made in 2018, not really enough time for fading.
Rooting for the little guys!
Open UA-cam and a see a CRD video uploaded 5 minutes ago? Guess no work is getting done for the next 23 minutes!
And 14 seconds
@@Ni5eiI came here to comment "you skipped 14 seconds??" ...huh. this is CRD comments after all 🫡
My typical rule of thumb is double it... because rewatching parts and then going down rabbit holes looking at related content and web searching
It's good for listening in the background as you work, too.
You're so interesting.
I worked for a company and we deployed around 600 HP T610 thin clients, and they did indeed use a VERY done up Linux based OS that had default things like integrated Citrix clients.
Hi there CRD, your AV tech videos brought me to your channel, best videos I’ve found!
ThinOS is indeed a Linux platform. I take care of the Linux client for Parallels RAS (remote app solution) and ThinOS was one of our active targets. This was before I joined but I can definitely confirm its Linux roots. Keep up the good work!
Looking at one of the firmware update files (Add ThinOS 2402 (9.5.1079) Merlin Image file for Dell Wyse 3040) it actually seems to be FreeBSD 12.0 based! But there seems to have been a 'ThinLinux' used before that.
part1Image1.img is a gz-compressed GPT partition table. In the first partition you'll find dtos/boot/{env.rc,kernel,ramdisk} which are unmistakingly FreeBSD bits and bobs.
The first stage EFI bootloader seems custom, though. It seems to verify the integrity of the second stage bootloader, kernel, ramdisk, etc, then it probably just jumps into the bootloader. Ie. it mostly seems to function as a secure boot shim.
For a moment, I was expecting the issue to be the same problem that This Does Not Compute diagnosed in "Wait...THAT'S what was wrong with my rare Mac clone?!"... cracked solder joints.
These things are more useful than you realize. Since the CPU is an Intel Atom x5-z8350 quad core and the computer has 2gb RAM and an 8gb EMMC on board, you can install either a very lightweight linux distro on it, or you can do like I did, and install Lakka on it, which is a front-end for Retro- arch. I've got two controllers hooked up to it, and it functions remarkably well as a mufti system game console. I can play NES, SNES, N64, Genesis, MAME, Playstation, etc.. on it super smooth.
According to a Wyse pamphlet of a German enterprise hardware retailer, ThinOS is based on BSD, and it even explicitly states that it's _not_ Linux-based.
I have it on very good authority that the vast majority of these were used in "Medical" and/or "Hospital" settings, where it would be on a stand up rolling cart, along with a USB scanner/RFID reader, key/mouse, a display port monitor, and a big battery to make it not top heavy. And then it would do exactly what you said it would do: Be remoted into a computer playing a bunch of computers playing other computers.
When I was doing Hardware install runs for one of my local hospital networks for EPIC deployment Dell WYSE thin Clients were what EPIC certified for office deployment and a card scanner was attached via USB and at boot it automatically ran a script to remote to a windows server login screen where the staff could login
Glad I dodged that bullet. I was researching them as a compact, energy efficient, and cheap PC for my daughter to do her schoolwork on. This was one I looked at. Ultimately I went with a 5060, which had an internal 8gb SATA SSD, which I swapped out for a 256gb bare board. I dropped in an additional 8gb ddr3, totalling 12. And added a wifi adapter to the functional m.2 slot. All for less than $100. And installed Linux mint. Works fine.
why not windows though
@@justdaddy as low powered as the PC is, starting as a thin client, I figured give it every bit of help it can get. Windows is quite heavy and bloated. Linux is pretty lightweight and efficient. Mint Mate flavor being especially similar to windows in interface means she can easily navigate it after being used to windows. And nothing she needs is exclusive to run in windows. Runs really well for a $100 PC.
@@cobrag0318eh, W10 runs just fine on 12gb of ram + ssd
A very important thing to mention about the M.2 Slot is that it in fact does NOT support PCIe!
It only has SDIO available, which the original Wifi+BT combo card uses.
wait. hang on. this is new to me - are you saying that this machine takes wifi cards that aren't PCIe, and aren't USB (as supported by the lanes in many/most PCIe slots) but are actually using the weird protocol used by those network cards that plug into SD slots?
@@CathodeRayDudeExcactly yeah :)
M.2 has support for SDIO and thats what Dell put in here. Theres a site dedicated to documenting Thin clients called Parkytowers and they even publish details about getting in more storage trough the use of an SD-Card adapter
@@CathodeRayDudeExcactly yeah. M.2 allows for the use of SDIO and thats what they used.
Look up "parkytowers wyse 3040" for a great writeup of the 3040 and more devices like it
@@CathodeRayDude I see you already wrote a pinned comment and found what I tried to link you to, for some reason youtube kept eating my comment so I wrote you a mail haha
@@CathodeRayDudeAlmost all x86 atom tablets that were semi-popular a few years ago did that exact thing, just with the wifi soldered to the board instead of on M.2. That's what the SoC in this Wyse was originally designed for.
Fujitsu Siemens made some half decent thin clients for a while, which had SO-DIMM ram and better SSD expandability. People which only needed a simple office machine were able to use them as a standalone PC: They also made decent microservers and console emulation boxes.
Did anyone else think that drill bit would be tiny-tiny size? I laughed in such magnitude that woke my neighbors.
Duuuuuude the computers at my old job ran ThinOS and connected to Windows! That shit was the bane of my existence, good thing the only software we really ran was some ancient thing called L4X.
Dude I would like to make a "little guys" music jingle for you. Leave me a few words of thought and I'll get right to work.
I have a first line for you:
"They're little, they're cute, and sometimes they even boot!" 😃
Fireport has been the wyse password since they moved to machines with an accessible bios/boot menu in the late 90s
This is actually a pretty cool video. I've worked in IT for more than 35 years, and for at least that long, I've been aware of people who have sought ways to unshackle vertical-market devices from their built-in limitations (like the CueCat scanner from the 1990s), find new uses for things that have outlived their purposes (like plain vanilla Palm OS organizers), and giving purpose to devices that were pretty much useless right out of the gate. While the practicality of such projects varies, thanks to the Internet, those who are inclined to breathe new life into such devices can readily look up what they can be used for and how to transform them. But being the first one to figure out how to transform a given device is always a process, and even with the Internet, we rarely get to see that process in motion. We also usually only can look up the successful transformations, which, I'm sure, are the minority of attempts; most people don't publish their failures. Thanks for sharing your process with us, CRD. The journey is inspirational and educational, even if you didn't reach the destination.
I turned a Mattel Barbie PC into a server with a mini-ITX motherboard and specialty power supply. I think it had a c500 in it when it was new.
6:01, power light barely visible through translucent plastic - This problem is shared by quite a few contemporary Dell products.
The Dell Wyse 5070 is actually a very good general PC that can be had for under $30 these days. They have M.2 for storage and are a great alternative to a raspberry pi for cheaper. I'm using a few of them for a Proxmox cluster.
Where I live everyone is asking for at least 3 times that much for a 5070.
After the housing crash in 2008 in US, gov't put in place strict regulations for financial market. Apparently a lot of financial info was being stored on local pc's, laptops, etc at these companies. So, part of the new regs was that all financial info had to be stored on secure servers, and employees could only thin client into the stuff via VM's and such. So, a huge chunk of the financial market suddenly shifted very quickly to thin-client computing. And then fintechs and financial companies came and went all the time, so these little things flooded the used market. I worked at a loan company for a short while, and they kept having issues with these things. IT guys walking around always had a spare 1 or 2 in their kit when wondering around. Someone would say "I'm having problems with my..." and they'd just unplug, swap it out, turn new one on. Good to go. These things were so cheap and disposable.
Deploying these to 500 call center clients was such a pain if you had monitors without displayports. The amount of time during COVID that I had to ship DP to DVI or DP to VGA adapters to call center users with these. Twice the shipping logistics.
One of my first jobs in the late 90’s was breaking down the components in a massive inventory of dumb terminals being phased out of use by Baptist Health in Miami, FL- at the time, I remember the exciting notion that computing was moving away from the archaic notion of a large, remote mainframe being accessed by stupid little nubs and towards a gleaming, fully featured desktop for every employee…
…it’s nice to see that 25 years later, we’re correcting our terrible mistake and going back to what made sense!
That's a pretty neat little unit for what it is. I've got a couple of them running Debian 12 as Raspi replacements. Everything installs fine, but there is one BIOS quirk that looks for a directory in the boot partition. If it's not there, it just refuses to boot.. So I got around that by USB booting GRUB, kicking off the OS boot, and then add an empty freaking directory in the right place. Then everything functions perfectly, lol.
I fixed Debian booting on these by starting the installer in recovery mode and forcing an install of grub to the uefi partition
@@dant5464 Ah that's a good tip to make it a little more streamlined! Not that I reinstall the things on a daily basis. But still, haha! I'm thinking about using one as a little NAS to bring in my backpack, with a cable to run it off a USB powerbank, and an external SSD mounted as storage. It should do that better than a Raspi at least.
@@H3adcrashI have one running as a NAS and print server at my parent's place, for a couple of users it's perfectly cromulent.
The dim power light is hilarious because I got my dad a Wyse 5070 as an HTPC and he had exactly the same complaint, he couldn't tell when it was on. He ended up getting a USB-powered flex light and effectively using that as the power LED.
I picked one of these up a few years ago for 34$ mainly just use it as a home server
Can't beat the price. I was looking into getting a couple and building a LAN for old school gaming like doom and such.
Until very recently, the electronic meat wrappers I worked on all ran VXWorks! Hobart Access Wrappers with the EPCP-1 control console are Geodes inside running VXWorks off a CF card.
i have this little guy, it runs a tiny server with an smb share, and is doing great
Have a number of these 3040's used as thin clients in secure areas and they have worked great.. Never had any issues with them doing what they are meant to do.
My bet is that unit has such a high hour count that the status LED is essentially burned out. I’ve only seen that on machines with a decade of constant run-time on them.
That's what I figured. This can be seen commonly on the scroll/num lock LED on constantly running keyboards. When you turn caps lock on, it's 10X as bright.
That is the case, I’ve seen dozens of Dell with very dimmed led power button
Though it looked quite bright without the button and as demonstrated, even a phone flashlight was incredibly dim through the white plastic part
@@resneptacle I’ve deployed Dell machines of this era back when I worked in IT. Laptops, desktops, servers… When new, the raw LEDs on the PCB would be so bright that it would be painful to look at them directly. The one in the video is relatively dim, implying that the machine has tens of thousands of hours on it.
The LED's on these would burn out quickly.
Even though the result was not optimal, this definitely was entertaining and I enjoyed this little guy 👍☺️👍
Hey, I have two of them!
Just picked them up a few weeks ago for £19 a piece. One of them is running Homeassistant, and the other one is something whose hardware I'm planning to mess around with!
how is it doing as an HA server? What is the avg power draw from the wall?
ThinOS really looks like a bespoke Unix-like operating system. The raw disk image starts with an ELF 32-bit LE SysV header that has weird values for padding, machine and executable type. The .pkg format looks custom, too.
No music on one of the ask the internet?!?! You owe us now.
this will come back and haunt him
IT IS OUR DUTY TO REMIND
A re upload is the only way forward
Literally unwatchable.
The bespokeness of ThinOS comes from the Wyse heritage.
That M.2 slot is solely for a custom WiFi card.
My wife's work sent her home with that exact model when they went all-remote early in COVID. (With two Dell branded DisplayPort equipped monitors, of course.) It was pre-configured to VPN in to her work and connect to a Windows "desktop" over some flavor of Remote Desktop/Citrix/etc.
I love the sneak peek of a future video!
I remember when I worked in fast food that we had two of these that worked all of the order screens, one for the front, one for the back. But they cheaped out on the monitors so they had to use DP to VGA adapters, also had these PS/2 button pads (with a PS/2 to USB adapter of course) that were used to navigate around, along with booting up over the network. Good times.
Cheese
mmm cheese
He makes a compelling point
Older Wyze thin clients ran Suse Enterprise, we had one at our DC and I ended up dumping the onboard image (Suse Ent 11) and converting it to a remote serial terminal. It had two serial ports! However, it was SLOWWWW. The stock image didn't come with any packages outside of your remote software and an old Firefox install.
The os image was on an IDE DOM, and it was an archive used with overlay FS but no packages would be saved anyway. There was only 1G of disk space, so I assume they discarded everything that wasn't usernames/passwords or realm.
Neat to see they still use 'fireport' as the BIOS password!
chicken
I really like the more relaxed atmosphere around the first part, where you're taking it apart. I think you did a great job segueing into getting back to explaining the specs. You did well with the off-the-cuff part of that. Definitely would look forward to more bits like that. :)
I have a few hundered of these at work I have supported for citrix RDP. They have a couple of quirks but are workhorses too.
First: There is a 12v and a 5v model, the 5v one has a dim power light, the 12v one is bright. I always cup my hands around the WYSE to block all light then look through finger gaps to read the light. Hook up the 12v brick to the 5v model and you have a paperweight, and they use the same barrel connector!
Second: On first power on, after power loss, they have monitor detect issues. They will flash an amber light a few times then turn off. Seems to be our DP to HDMI cables/adapters exacerbate these issues. The solution is to fully hook it up except hook no display to it, give it a minute, hit the power button, give it another 30secs (the light should change to white), then hook up the monitor. Then it will work unless power is removed, powering down or rebooting is fine. After mass power outages we get a ton of calls.
Yeah, they don't like some DP-HDMI adapters. But some others work without any issues. The worst part about this is that with the incompatible adapter they get stuck in an infinite loop and don't boot at all until it is removes
I just had a lightbulb moment as I saw the log window at 9:57 ! The plastics factory I used to work for used these as satellite units to connect to label printers and such via (I think) a Windows VM.
Love wyse terminals, they'd have a variety of Os sometimes wyse/thinos, but many times xp or win7 embedded those were the best to play with as a pentester's playground.
You'd be autologged in as a local admin, just with the wyse file based write filter limiting your changes and no ability to turn it off but once you have broken out of the lockdown (cert install, open with, etc) you'd add an administrative user. Shutdown -l (log off, don't reboot) holding shift to prevent auto login. Log in as your new user and disable the FBWF.
Boom, you've admin, on the underlying host. Install an implant. Enable the FBWF again. Reboot. Wait for someone to come along and use it, and you're in the wider network.
Why the new user when you're already admin? Because there is a 'volatile profile' controlled by a registry key within HKLM. You could remove your user's sid from the key, or you could just add a new one.
Hey I used to manage these at work! Dells assumption is that you'll also be running a Wyse Management Server to handle the configuration of them. You setup some DNS stuff and then when you turn the Wyse client on it gets directed to the WMS and pulls down the configuration that you setup. They're pretty good little machines for just getting people connected to a vdi.
When I left the office I was working at we were in the beginning phases of replacing desktops with WYSE "terminals" and moving people over to VDI.
We had bigger models and win10 got installed on them. They took about 5 minutes to start if you shut it off, and once you logged in all you could do was launch Edge to log into and launch your VDI session.
Yup WYSE management is like BES server for Thin Clients.
I Cannot express how much i enjoy the name of this series
The Z8350 CERTAINLY supports more than 2GB of RAM. Own several with 4GB. I'm pretty sure I seen machines with 8GB? Oh and there are super minified Windows installers, Tiny10 1809 was some 2GB after installation with page file and hiberfile disabled?
I'm just going off Intel ARK. I've heard of people finding errors on it before, though.
Are you sure those use the Z8350? Some very similar atoms support a lot more RAM.
@@Schule04 definitely Z8350. I've got a Fusion5 T90B+. Z8350, 4GB RAM and 64GB eMMC. There's versions of the Lenovo Miix 320 with 4GB of RAM too. There's versions of the Intel Compute Stick with the Z8350 and 8GB of RAM.
I got a great deal on a pack of thin clients from a bankruptcy auction once. They're great alternatives to Raspberry Pis for basic purposes, bascially any time you just need _An Computer_ to accomplish a task.
This is so true.
Raspberry Pi was supposed to be cheap. That's what made them awesome. But for $80+ you can get more better stuff.
Sometimes Phil's Computer Lab covers these, but it's usually the much older sub-1ghz models that are more suited for Win9x and DOS retro gaming.
Not sure about this particular model, but many thin clients are popular with the vintage/retro gaming crowd. The processors may be pretty slow by today's standards, but they run FreeDOS and DOS-era (even some Windows era) games perfectly fine. The only catch is the sound card. Some of the sound chips that these use aren't fully compatible with the sound standards used back in the day (OPLx/Sound Blaster/etc.) So you'll either have sound that doesn't work at all (no music and/or digital sampled audio) or music that sounds wrong/weird/incorrect. Your mileage may vary.
There are very old thin clients which are usable as retro computers but can have a slightly weird or incomplete souncards.
Starting from early-mid 2000s, any attempts at DOS compatible soundcards have died out and have been replaced by AC97 port of the chipset.
To go along with Windows Vista, AC97 was extended into Azalia (HD Audio), which is mostly what we have until today. Well now Azalia is dying too, to be replaced by USB UAC2. But this computer would specifically have Azalia audio.
On AC97 and Azalea, you can just use SBEMU or one of its forks.
This one only boots UEFI and not in BIOS mode, so only modern OSes are supported. But it can run an emulator like dosbox well.
@@Schule04 Does it have CSM? This wasn't the era when it started being dropped yet, it might just be baked in, though locking out MBR boot makes sense. For systems with CSM, any number of EFI bootloaders can chain boot DOS, rEFInd for example or maybe Clover and the likes.
@@SianaGearzIt doesn't have any way of enabling CSM in the BIOS GUI.
13:51 My Dell's BIOS has text mode UI, which I think it is default UI provided by AMI given that one ASUS machine I had has similar looking UI.
The menu at that screen looks similar, except mine displays those options inside a blue popup box.
Many of the cheaper machines have a normal BIOS. Basically all the Latitudes and Precisions have a the custom Dell BIOS. Although I will say my D800 (made in 2005 but introduced in 2003) has the older text-mode custom BIOS. I'm guessing the change to the current style probably started with the ~2007 models (like Gravis' favorite D420) as these models are 64 bit only.
MY guess is the LED on the board for the indicator is dying, it probably was bright enough to show at one point, have a case with a similar issue, HDD LED works fine, power LED is so dim it's almost unnoticeable
I appreciate your presentations very much, Gravis! Keep em coming.
This series reassures me, I am not the only one to collect tiny computer/thin-clients
Dell Optiplex and Precision desktops for the last couple of years have been like that with the light pipe on thr power buttons.
I actually thought about buying one of these as a “not a raspberry pi” but I’m so glad I went with HP Elitedesk ultra small form factor pcs. They’re about $100 give or take depending on generation but are actually great little PCs that come with all kinds of useful things like Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, real m.2 slots. I use a Ryzen one that supports a custom AMD GPU module for light gaming, and an Intel one for my home server.
I completely agree, I have no hands-on with those but a friend tells me they're great, and I have the Lenovo equivalent, the THinkcenter. Those are *perfectly* cromulent.
I used to go the route of Raspberry Pi but have also found that micro PCs work better. They're x86, faster, have upgradeable memory, faster SSD possibilities, and can be had for the same price or cheaper than what Raspberry Pis are sold for today.
Plus, they stack so nicely and easy in the event you need a few for different things. ❤
Thing is that a microPC is still $50 for a 4th Gen, yes very capable but also _10 years old_ nowadays, and a 6th Gen is more like $70. Quite a jump from the sub-$20 price these can go for.
The power light being dim is a problem on old Dell machines. They've often been on such a long time that the LED has degraded to 50% or less of its original brightness. When that Wyse terminal was new, that LED would have been blindingly bright without the power button in front of it.
It doesn't help that those LEDs are heavily overdriven, which causes them to degrade in a relatively short time span. I've seen them go dark after just 5 years.
They can be replaced, I think they're 5050 package LED modules, but they're bi-color LEDs, which getting exact replacements for can be a headache.
I had to stop the video and comment right away when you pulled out the "worst keyboard you own". We use that exact keyboard on many of the machines at the place I work and I HATE THEM. The form factor is wonky and they have the worst membrane I've ever used. And the people at my work ABUSE them, they're dirty and falling apart. Glad to see I'm not alone.
The "Lets ask the internet" to me harkins back to something I'd expect to see on Home Star Runner!
@13:00 work in healthcare IT, Imprivata and Caradigm were the SSO's that we used a lot (sign into the SSO, then it signs you into everything else)
I think we may need an additional theme and title card for “Let’s manually edit system files” 😸
Btw, at 15:30, not sure if I’m doing an overeager nerdsnipe here but you likely could have run `lsblk` to list the recognized block devices rather than visually scanning the contents of `/dev`.
For some reason, lsblk just fuzzes my visual receptors, I have a hard time parsing its output for reasons I can't explain. I use it frequently, just not for discovering what block devices are in the system. Maybe it's just leftover muscle memory from Red Hat (pre-enterprise) 5 though.
@@CathodeRayDude When you say that, I can immediately picture a visual-fogged version of its output in my mind. (same with netstat… sigh) So I sympathize pretty hard.
I also put my faith in lsblk to sort the devices such that the ones I actually care about end up near the bottom of its output… even though it doesn’t promise to do this, and it will likely change this behavior one day… ( ´_ゝ`)
blkid is also useful because it shows detected filesystems on the partitions. IIRC lsblk doesn't show any info about the contents of a partition unless it's already mounted.
this is actually my new favorite series, i have actually been looking for ultra low power systems to act as compact portals to my server computer
2:00 - Here's a dumb question. Was the barrel connector the correct polarity?
I like this video. And your humor. You ARE very bright btw.
The same day as watching this, I saw one in the wild being used at a hospital
The clock battery died, thats why it wont turn on. The power light flashes for about 20 seconds, then boots, but is really dim and hard to see
I work at a hospital and we do have thousands of these devices. The 16GB ones are the only ones we got as even thinOS isn't that thin.
A Void Linux installation with XFCE will consume 4.3GB on disk. And it's not like Puppy or DSL, it's a full distro that one might run on a workstation.
I think it could run windows using Windows To Go, which is a cursed portable version of windows that runs off a USB drive. It wouldn't exactly be "installed" per se, but it would probably work.
11:25 For an AMD64 that only supports 2^31 bytes of RAM, the x32 ABI is a compelling option.
I also have a couple of Intel Atom tablets. They do run, but the main issue is RAM. 4 GB feels okay, but Windows 10 just crawls with only 2 GB. You can view pictures or play an MP4 file, but opening a PDF will take a few minutes.
Love the way the Caps come down in your opening title-card, and IMO the easiest way to get Linux onto that thing (without getting your hands dirty) would be to write a boot-able image onto the eMMC from the installer's OS; it's even possible to write the download onto the drive without storing it intermediately. I don't know what image to recommend off the top of my head, VM images are pretty close to what we're looking for but could be missing drivers for real hardware and installation-media is ephemeral. You'd be looking for a "persistent" LiveUSB image.
My IT Professor told me that terminals from way back in the day are different than a thin client.
I remember while working for a security company in the UK, the company would use tiny systems like that, the advantage was you could hibe them any where and had so many applications.
"While we're waiting for this to fail..."
Love it :D
I run Tiny10 on a similar box with emmc. Actually runs pretty well! I have two of them, the other runs Alpine Linux because minimalism.
2:34 Those CMOS batteries are actually very easy to get replacements for. Just buy CR2032 batteries with soldering tags, cut the wires from the original battery and solder them onto the tags of the new one. Then wrap the new battery in electrical tape or a heat shrink tube similar to the original one, and you're good to go. I've done it many times on laptops using this style of battery, always works.