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vajra

vajra is was (RIP) a modest, low-power NAS/homeserver and workstation — a Surface 3 running Void Linux from its comfy docking station. Use cases include email, time tracking, playing music and podcasts.

Vajra on the desk showing the login screen with split keyboard visible in the foreground

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This device was an accidental gift from an eBay seller whom I bought a refurbished GPU from. They sent me this as well (with no power supply) by mistake and after I messaged them 2 or 3 times asking if they wanted me to ship it back they said "just keep it." It sat around mostly unused for about a year and a half after briefly testing the hardware and lamenting at the TypeCover keyboard.

More recently, I had a mind to use it as a homeserver since its low power consumption and modest specs make it ideal for that kind of usage. I found a docking station to setup the device with (ethernet, more USB ports, and a more reliable power supply than any USB adapter I had lying around) installed Void Linux (musl) on it using almost an identical setup as described in filesystem surgery and restored from a kyanite backup. The only thing that didn't work out of the box was that the backlight stayed on at 100% brightness all the time (and if you close the TypeCover the machine locks up, but I never use it), so I used yggdrasil to compile a kernel with the options described here and it worked like a charm.

While I work my day job from a Windows machine, this machine serves as my point-of-contact with reality via SSH with X forwarding — pumping tunes and keeping an acme9k window open, mostly. It also sports an almost identical copy of the desktop environment on ksatrya (except with urxvt as the terminal since it launches way faster on this hardware, and compositing turned off) for workstation usage if the need or mood arises.

Usually, my media library on 2x1TB RAIDZ1 is plugged in here and available over the local network over sshfs.