CLIENTS · LAPTOPS · SMALL MACHINES
One admin workstation. Everything else is a client.
“One admin workstation. Everything else is a client.”
ACTIVE SYSTEMS
Core Ultra 5 125U, 16 GB RAM, 512 GB SSD. Arch Linux + XMonad with configuration kept in the public gruvnode repository.
The SSD is LUKS-encrypted because the laptop leaves the house. Updates are manual. Closing the lid does not suspend it — open it again and continue where you left off.
Old stock L500 upgraded with a WD Blue SSD and the maximum 8 GB RAM. Debian 13 Stable + XFCE, zram-tools and only the applications actually requested: Firefox, LibreOffice, GIMP, Bluetooth and printing.
Used with a Brother SP1 sublimation printer and Cricut. It is the deliberate exception to the lab's manual-update habit: unattended security updates are enabled because the laptop may stay off for a week or two.
Core i5-12400, 16 GB RAM, 512 GB NVMe, Intel UHD 730, Debian 13 + XFCE. It lives in the workshop near the Suzuki and is used for tutorials, YouTube, Spotify, searches and a terminal.
No personal accounts and no homelab access. It sits in the WLAN/IoT network as a deliberately generic tool computer.
Debian 12 + XFCE. Usually isolated on guest Wi-Fi. Its most important job may still be playing Monkey Island in bed, but an Ethernet cable can turn it into a tiny emergency SSH terminal for a nearby machine.
The same physical Pi used for experiments since 2019. It currently runs a tiny solo-mining/CKPool lottery experiment: technically interesting, economically irrelevant.
It has eaten two SD cards and is now on card #3, which is why it gets UPS power even though the workload itself is unimportant. A long-ago fan-pin mistake also supplied the traditional small “brutzel” lesson.
Now sold to a young buyer starting an IT apprenticeship. Before sale it received a fresh SSD, new internal and external batteries, Kryonaut, and the cooler from the dGPU version with the unused contact area insulated.
It left with Debian 13 + dwm and its setup explained rather than wiped into a generic showroom install.
The X1 and Toshiba share the laptop VLAN but cannot see each other. Each has its own QNAP account and share. The workshop PC cannot reach the homelab at all. None of them can manage OPNsense, QTS, TrueNAS, Proxmox, UniFi or the servers; that belongs to Cthulhu.