Meeting Notes

May 2026

Songs

• Yesterday
• She’s So Heavy
• Helter Skelter
• Lady Madonna
• Here There and Everywhere
• Brain

Topics & Links

• copyparty
• project-brain
• Spreadsheet
• DM Helper

April 2026

Project NOMAD — Knowledge that never goes offline

Release 1.32.0 is here: announcement

December 2025

Notes on 10" Server Racks, MiniPCs, and Related Hardware

In deference to most members’ sensibilities, the photos of my “machine stacks & racks” cabling have not been included.

What’s the Purpose of a 10" Server Rack?

• Portability
• Organization
• Clean look
• Good for multiples of 1U items

Pros

• Enforces discipline & planning
• Concentrates compute
• Works well with Tiny/Mini/Micro 1L PCs

Cons

• Stuff that doesn’t fit:
  • Various MiniPCs
  • Cheaper Chinese units > 1U height
  • Taller Intel NUCs
  • External hard drives
• No solution to power or power‑brick issues
• When 10" isn’t really 10": inside rails = 8.75"
• Ventilation challenges

Mini‑ITX Examples

• NAS boards
• Questions to solve:
  • Where’s the power supply going?
  • Where’s SATA storage going to go?

Minisforum BD795i SE

• 16 cores, 32 threads, 128GB RAM
• Questions to solve:
  • Where’s the GPU going to go?
  • Where’s the power supply going to go?

Current Favorite Value MiniPC — Peladn WO4

But it doesn’t fit in 1U!

Heard about it from this YouTube video.

Multiple variants available — make sure you get the right configuration: Peladn WO4 on peladn.us

Specs:

• AMD Ryzen 5 7640HS
• 6‑core / 12‑thread CPU
• 32GB DDR5 RAM
• 1TB NVMe
• 2 NICs: 1 × 2.5Gb, 1 × 1Gb
• 2 NVMe slots
• ~$384 with 10% discount code Geek1201
• Ships from US warehouse

Why it’s compelling:

• Worth it for the RAM alone
• Great for a Proxmox node with Ceph storage due to 2nd NIC and 2nd NVMe slot

VirtualizationHowto

• YouTube channel
• Blog

May 2025

Internet in a Box (IIAB)

• CD3WD on Wikipedia
• CD3WD Project

It’s been 2 years since my HumLUG presentation on “Internet in a Box”. Here’s a link to the slides.

I’ve found that IIAB works better from an x86 machine rather than a Raspberry Pi, especially if you’re going to load up Open Street Maps and expect to be zooming around between the 10 levels of detail.

Today I got x86 IIAB resurrected in its April 2023 configuration and am now updating what content I can.

Questions about IIAB are welcome!

Video of the presentation

March 2025

MQTT

winget install mosquitto
winget install --id=thomasnordquist.MQTT-Explorer -e

• mqtt_serve_tester
• ps-mqtt-sqlite
• DB Browser for SQLite