I’m not sure what I had in mind… I have a four GMKtec mini PCs with an Intel N5105 CPU and 8GB ram. They work fine for modest workloads and they are integrated in my local lab domain quite well. Unlke my three POP_OS systems that need to be patched about every other day The OpenBSD machines are quite stable. The GMK has a small fan and there is a lot of dust in the lab. Also given the amount of disk and ram it’s just not enough for what might be next.

I’ve been tinkering

In recent days two of my Intel NUCs have been screaming. The first was running OpenBSD as my haprxy. And the second is running VMware as the host OS for my PRD, UAT and DEV machines for a customer. My VMware ESXi installation is long overdue for patching but given the state of VMware this is not much fun. Also I/we need to migrate from ClearLinux to CentOS it’s a very slow process as integration has other prices to pay.

I tried to migrate my VM from VMware to Synology. While Synology did the task just fine it complained about ClearLinux and refused to boot. Enter my latest OpenBSD VMM and chroot experience and I think that might be better for now.

Beelink GTR6 Mini PC, AMD Ryzen 9 6900HX (8C/16T, up to 4.9GHz), Mini Computer 32GB DDR5 500GB PCIe4.0 NVMe SSD, Desktop Computer 8K UHD Quad Display 4*HDMI, Micro PC WiFi6/BT5.2/Gaming/Office

I’m not sure what comes installed on the hardware. Once I completed the first boot to BIOS it told me I had a Windows partition but I do not see a Windows license or decal. So what did I get? It booted my OpenBSD 7.3 USB just fine and the installation completed per usual. My config script worked great and I have completed the installation of two identical systems.

I have not decided what to do next but I am looking at VMM, chroot of microservices, chroot of full OS and aps. But quiet for the moment.