Thin client router part 2: virtual insanity

 

So in part 1, I set-up the hardware and the base OS install. Now I'd like to try out OpenWRT with the Dell Wyse 3040 thin client and the Comfast CF-953AX USB3 WiFi6 1800Mbps adapter. Unfortunately the thin client has an Atom x5-Z8350 CPU, which none of the official OpenWRT binaries will run on it directly (more on that in part 3, I guess). Nevertheless, I'd still like to test-out the WiFi adapter with OpenWRT, so I'll do the next best thing: run it in a virtual machine.

Misusing the Dell Wyse 3040 thin client

The Dell Wyse 3040 thin client

So there have been a lot of people messing with these dinky little computers and I'm certainly not the first or the most ground breaking. However I have found that a lot of the info I am after is spread quite widely and is often not the most clear or informative. So this will hopefully be the first in a series of posts about how to mess with these boxes reliably.

Okonomiyaki

 

I've been holding off plagiarising this recipe from Eat Your Kimchi because I wanted to support the creators. Unfortunately it looks like their blog site's gone off the air some time since I last looked at it, so it's "Yo-ho, yo-ho, a pirate's life for me!"

Basically okonomiyaki is a Japanese cabbage fritter. The EYK video covers the Osaka-style in that it has pork-belly strips on the A-side. I might as well add some of my own "as you like it" changes along the way to make it look like I didn't just copy the recipe outright.

The QUICK quick guide to setting up a WireGurd VPN tunnel

 

 Background story (skippable)

So I've been maintaining a set of OpenVPN tunnels into various NAT-routed networks for several years now and every now and then a software update will declare some of the keys too old and insecure to be used. This means I have to dust-off the TLS PKI files and remember how to use it so I can press-out a new set of keys and distribute these to all the places they need to be. PKI is generally a drag and I decided it was finally time to learn how to set-up the new and hip WireGuard tunnelling solution.

Unfortunately it took me a couple of hours to set it up just the way I wanted as there are a few large differences between the two systems:

• Wireguard does not use TLS/PKI, it just uses pre-shared public/private key pairs
• Wireguard uses a peer-to-peer setup, not client-server like OpenVPN
• Wireguard ignores NAT by default and is fairly "quiet" so you may need keep-alive messages to keep UDP ports open trhough NAT routers
  

How to run a "simple" Samba Podman container under Fedora 31

 

This is really just a "note to self" to document how I set-up a basic home-share from a Samba daemon running in a Podman container under Fedora 31. Unfortunately doing such a notionally simple task involves getting a bunch of slightly finicky security and isolation systems to cohabit in just the right way.