So, a buddy of mine dropped off a box of 18 Wyse 3040 & 5010 thin clients. I believe they all run W10 embedded, but doing some research, I think I can also run a lightweight Linux OS like maybe Tiny Core. The 5010 can run SuSE Linux Desktop 11, ThinOS, or ThinOS PCOIP acording to Dell.
So, the burning question I have today is ‘If you were gifted a box of 18 Wyse 3040 & 5010 thin clients, what would you do with them’? I want something I can incorporate into my already established homelab.
Inundate me with ideas!
When I’m looking at thin clients for use in my systems, I look at a few different things:
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.
I used a 3040 to run a vaultwarden install and a web server. I switched to something more powerful (more ram, more ssd, faster CPU) and added jellyfin, a file server, and some *arr apps. I still have the 3040, thinking about putting pihole on it.