The Dell Wyse 3040 is a nifty little machine that is extremely small and a low power consumer. They are however not without issues. This is my foray into trying to get a couple of them working on my homelab. I bought a couple in early March 2024 based on watching Apalrd’s videos Dell Wyse 3040 Thin Client Teardown and Installing Proxmox VE 7 on Debian Bullseye with the various Dell Wyse thin clients.

I have collected nine (9) mostly functional Dell Wyse 3040 thin clients for use in my experimentation with Proxmox Clusters and SDN and Site-2-Site VPN configurations with Tailscale. Yes, I know I have a problem. :)

On the upside, they are very small low power consuming Debian 12 servers that have a 1Gbps NIC and run headless nicely once you fix the BIOS settings and Debian configuration correctly. What is not nice is their CMOS batteries are all mostly dying on me and their connector is a odd type that is not supported by many vendors and are between $8-$12 USD to replace. For example the Rome Tech CR2032 CMOS BIOS Battery for Dell Wyse 3040 is about $9.89 USD as of posting this. This bothers me intensely as the actual CR2032 can be picked up for well under a dollar ($1 USD) each at LiCB CR2032 3V Lithium Battery(10-pack) for a pack of 10 for $6 USD. Also, I’m picking these units up with power adapter for between $20 and $45 on eBay and the $10 bite jacks my price per unit up a good bit. So what to do?

I have a significant investment in my WSLv2 Ubuntu 22.04.3 LTS installation. It has my Nvidia GPU setup nicely integrated and several machine learning demos and tests I’ve built and use for keeping current on machine learning. With Ubuntu 24.04 LTS released, I now want to play around in the newer version but don’t want to move or worse copy my entire set of models and repositories across. I have well over 500Gb of content and absolutely don’t want two copies of those floating around. I’m looking for a solution to this and figure others have encountered it.

We live in a world with a penny ($0.01 USD) per GB of storage. I just found this bare drive MDD (MD20TS25672NAS) 20TB 7200 RPM 256MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5” Internal Hard Drive (for NAS, Network Storage) - 5 Years Warranty (Renewed) for $199.99 USD. I also found Avolusion PRO-X USB 3.0 External Hard Drive (Black) - 2 Year Warranty (20TB) for $229.99 $219.99 USD with the USB C enclosure.