Is there "White Girl Drunk" for computer hardware?

[Aremis]

I think some tech is so cool, and other tech is meh.  But, garunteed if you had a large enough group of people and you went into a place like computer reset, no matter what, everyone would find a use for things.  I realized this morning, my whole life has been centered around hacking stuff.  The RMS style hacking, kevin mitnick curiosity hacking, not I'm going to put BSG out of business type hacking.  My grampas tool shop is where CNC milling started, and it only occurred to me the other day that it took hackers to make a drill press be programmable on a rigged up arm.

 

I see hacks everywhere, and I get jazzed that someone had the intuition to create something clever.

 

 

I love commodore because they actively worked to find the cheapest and most powerful solutions for their day to bring to market.  They had to think rationally about how to conduct their business.  Hacking, I'd say, is something I'm very knowledgeable about.  However if you know anything about the Commdore 900, you'll know it was commodores proposition for a distributed computer running Unix, and was the cas that ended up being used for the A2000 and many of the business machines.

 

I think I'm white girl wasted on distributed computing lol.  I don't have enough of an understanding of how it works, but I'm fascinated enough to keep going.

 

 

This is another cool video.  This product had a lot of the same design ideas the 900 had, but making it work in windows by hacking their terminal client services, which, in 2000 and XP, were basically in every version of the OS, just there wasn't really a way to access it via user end.  You'd need to know some terminal buffoonery to figure it out.

 

I had an idea for something that I still want to be able to do.  I want a server with GPU's and all the sauce and spice, and then clients that connect to it like a phone, laptop, or terminal PC.  Then I keep all the wires and mess out of the way using only thin clients or fat clients to do desk end stuff.  I see things like those 6800HU based ryzen mini pc's, and those look cute, but those aren't much more than a beefy fat client to me.

 

I wish it was easier to do stuff this way.  Maybe I should start a company lol.

[igormp]

16 minutes ago, Aremis said:

Then I keep all the wires and mess out of the way using only thin clients or fat clients to do desk end stuff.

Do you mean stuff like VDI?

[ToboRobot]

Apple Ecosystem?

[Aremis]

1 minute ago, igormp said:

Do you mean stuff like VDI?

You know what linus has with his big ass machine and the fibre runs going to his office?  I want that but done on a network connection so I can turn my phone on, it does a network check, boom it connects to the server, phone terminal runs on the server.  Desktop, laptop, wherever, independant of site.  Obviously to game you'd need to be local but thats not the point.

 

The point is keeping all your data from being in a big ass mess and keeping all your clients secure.

 

Like true nas with a desktop OS front end that runs on another machine.  Schools set up mini terminals that connect back to a server right?  I want that as an entire user system.

[Aremis]

6 minutes ago, ToboRobot said:

Apple Ecosystem?

Apple can do some things like that but eh not really lol.

 

The remote session stuff is cool but the individual machines all use the same ammount of power.

 

The CRD video shows exactly what I'm talking about.  Rather than every machine be a pentium 4 running barely any software, run 1 machine with a terminal hookup.  Then you get 7 users, all at once, on one machine.

 

Like ok heres an example for all of you.  I'm pretty sure most of you would see a nintendo switch and think games console or mod thing.  I see a switch and I think, oh thats the perfect netbook to put in my bag with a bluetooth keyboard.  Mine happens to run Ubuntu, but I'll be swapping to an arch setup soon.

 

If I were to do normal computer beep boop whatever, I'd do it on my switch and use 16 watts.  If I wanted OOMPH I connect to the server and open my remote terminal.  If I had a different terminal with less power used, cool.

 

 

Where the apple stuff falls flat is my desktop 3,1 uses 250watts idle, has 1600 watts of capacity with 2 PSU's, powerbook uses 125 watts no matter what, MBP 2012 uses a lot of power, almost everything around here except my arm machines and my consoles use too much god damn electricity.  If I had this sort of island-to-hub setup, then I have one server that runs all the power hungry stuff, using power like a fridge would and largely being ignored, but your terminals that you can have all over the place use almost nothing.  But, you still get the bonus of the server's firepower.

 

PRobably to make this work legit thered need to be an optical option anyways, which honestly annoys me, but its not like I can do anything about that.

Edited March 3, 2023 by Aremis
random shit my brain thought of to say to illustrate my interest better

[mr cheese]

I think you're describing something between VDI, remote desktop, and Proxmox lol

Currently have my whole network setup with individual VLANs and a Wireguard management interface that lets only my devices connect amongst my various machines. Proxmox machines on my network serve as virtual hosts that I can just remote into at any given moment for the handful of systems I can run in a small enough footprint to virtualize on an i7-4790

 

To be honest though, some virtual/physical Windows machines and VNC/RDC sounds like it'll do just what you want it to do. I have a my laptop and phone set up to do that, from anywhere. Wireguard VPN -> SSH, RDC, VNC, whatever the system I wanna connect to. No gaming though, still figuring that one out, but Steam has remote play too... lol.

 

TL;DR remote desktop and a personal VPN sounds like just what you want

[igormp]

18 minutes ago, Aremis said:

You know what linus has with his big ass machine and the fibre runs going to his office?  I want that but done on a network connection so I can turn my phone on, it does a network check, boom it connects to the server, phone terminal runs on the server.  Desktop, laptop, wherever, independant of site.  Obviously to game you'd need to be local but thats not the point.

 

The point is keeping all your data from being in a big ass mess and keeping all your clients secure.

 

Like true nas with a desktop OS front end that runs on another machine.  Schools set up mini terminals that connect back to a server right?  I want that as an entire user system.

That really does sound like a VDI solution lol

[Aremis]

8 minutes ago, igormp said:

That really does sound like a VDI solution lol

Link me I don't know what you're talking about lol.

 

It might be, but I don't feel like learning about new types of config files.

[Aremis]

14 minutes ago, mr cheese said:

I think you're describing something between VDI, remote desktop, and Proxmox lol

Currently have my whole network setup with individual VLANs and a Wireguard management interface that lets only my devices connect amongst my various machines. Proxmox machines on my network serve as virtual hosts that I can just remote into at any given moment for the handful of systems I can run in a small enough footprint to virtualize on an i7-4790

 

To be honest though, some virtual/physical Windows machines and VNC/RDC sounds like it'll do just what you want it to do. I have a my laptop and phone set up to do that, from anywhere. Wireguard VPN -> SSH, RDC, VNC, whatever the system I wanna connect to. No gaming though, still figuring that one out, but Steam has remote play too... lol.

 

TL;DR remote desktop and a personal VPN sounds like just what you want

VNC is a horrible end user experience.  Its good for a concept, but does not do what I'd need it to do.

[igormp]

4 minutes ago, Aremis said:

Link me I don't know what you're talking about lol.

 

It might be, but I don't feel like learning about new types of config files.

It was just a quick google away, but there you go:

https://www.vmware.com/topics/glossary/content/virtual-desktop-infrastructure-vdi.html

 

https://aws.amazon.com/what-is/vdi/

[mr cheese]

1 minute ago, Aremis said:

VNC is a horrible end user experience.  Its good for a concept, but does not do what I'd need it to do.

Then you have alternatives, lots of them. RDC is fantastic, especially on local connections but provided you have good upload on your WAN side and good download where you are in the world it works great, mobile app is stellar. AnyDesk is good too, can be locked down. if you want to connect to desktops from anywhere.... you're gonna need one of these...

5 minutes ago, Aremis said:

Link me I don't know what you're talking about lol.

VDI just stands for Virtual Desktop Infrastructure, if that's what you're asking. Same stuff I'm mentioning, and the same stuff my corporate job uses. Physical devices, and virtual desktops at will when I need one, managed by a corporate virtual machine host with its own remote desktop viewing software that I'm assuming doesn't differ much from VNC.

[Aremis]

5 minutes ago, mr cheese said:

Then you have alternatives, lots of them. RDC is fantastic, especially on local connections but provided you have good upload on your WAN side and good download where you are in the world it works great, mobile app is stellar. AnyDesk is good too, can be locked down. if you want to connect to desktops from anywhere.... you're gonna need one of these...

VDI just stands for Virtual Desktop Infrastructure, if that's what you're asking. Same stuff I'm mentioning, and the same stuff my corporate job uses. Physical devices, and virtual desktops at will when I need one, managed by a corporate virtual machine host with its own remote desktop viewing software that I'm assuming doesn't differ much from VNC.

Oh like Novell?  Yeah thats what I'm talking about.  Exactly.  Just didn't know what it was called lol.

[mr cheese]

7 minutes ago, Aremis said:

Oh like Novell?  Yeah thats what I'm talking about.  Exactly.  Just didn't know what it was called lol.

unsure what Novell is, can't find anything in a short google search

1 hour ago, Aremis said:

I want a server with GPU's and all the sauce and spice, and then clients that connect to it like a phone, laptop, or terminal PC.  Then I keep all the wires and mess out of the way using only thin clients or fat clients to do desk end stuff.

I know my solution isn't exactly like how you want it, since you can't do multiple users on the same OS at the same time, but bear in mind Linus was using independent VMs with a common media storage on a network drive. 

If you want one machine driving multiple GPUs, just use Proxmox or another baremetal VM host. It's easy to use if you've ever used VMware or VirtualBox. network connections are bridged through the network device Proxmox is using, otherwise you can add PCIe network cards and forward them through alongside your GPUs. My hackintosh has a forwarded RX 580 and Intel NIC (due to the limitations of my lil baby switch only having one gigabit port) but functions, when remoted in, exactly as if I was connected to it directly. 

 

You can do this at home, even if you don't have a GPU forwarded any old PC with 4 cores and 8GB of RAM can be used to test multiple machines on one computer with only remote access. You can even disable the iGPU and forward that and even some USB ports, allowing you to run a machine through the VM as if the VM didn't even exist. Proxmox will just use a qemu virtual GPU, which is slow but functional nonetheless.

 

This is very attainable, and easier than you think, and can be done with cheap old Optiplex's and stuff you already have