My Unenlightened View of VPN Tunnels

[Klueless]

... either reuse an older PC

Thank you, that is the approach I'm going to take. Grabbed an old laptop, I'm going to set it to never sleep, close the lid and stuff it in a corner.

 

[RMerlin]

RMerlin, I like the NUC range of tiny PC's, are the Quotom PC's at the same level of reliability as the Intel offerings?

Considering Qotom are highly liked by the pfsense community, I assume they never shown any reliability issues. And having passive cooling does remove one potential failure point out of the equation.

NUCs are great devices, but sometimes you'll rather have something that's passively cooled for noise reasons. NUCs can be a bit expensive too. Personally if I needed a small computer to act as a remote "terminal", I would probably go with Qotom at this time, until someone else shows any recurring reliability issues with them.

Mine runs 24/7 hosting XCP-NG, which runs one Win10 VMs.

 

[RMerlin]

Thank you, that is the approach I'm going to take. Grabbed an old laptop, I'm going to set it to never sleep, close the lid and stuff it in a corner.

Be careful tho, laptops are generally not designed to run 24/7, so it might die an early death...

 

[L&LD]

Considering Qotom are highly liked by the pfsense community, I assume they never shown any reliability issues. And having passive cooling does remove one potential failure point out of the equation.

NUCs are great devices, but sometimes you'll rather have something that's passively cooled for noise reasons. NUCs can be a bit expensive too. Personally if I needed a small computer to act as a remote "terminal", I would probably go with Qotom at this time, until someone else shows any recurring reliability issues with them.

Mine runs 24/7 hosting XCP-NG, which runs one Win10 VMs.

Thank you. I have customers with NUCs from the first three or four generations that are still going strong. 24/7 use cases too. Not that noisy in a busy office type environment, even on the midnight shifts.

The Qotom seems to be about the same price with a much older/weaker CPU (required, for passive cooling).

What is interesting is that they offer 4 Intel LAN ports in such a small device. I'm interested.

 

[RMerlin]

What is interesting is that they offer 4 Intel LAN ports in such a small device. I'm interested.

Since my Qotom is in the living room, I wanted it to be fully quiet The extra LAN portswere just a bonus here, I used them when testing various firewall distros in a second VM. I wish I could have put more than 8 GB of RAM tho.

Granted, 5th gen Intel ain't that recent, but to be fair recent generations only provided marginal improvements, so it shouldn't be that far behind performance-wise. Kinda surprised tho that they haven't moved on to 6th or even 7th gen by now however, those are 4 years old now, and probably suffer badly from the recent Spectre miitigations. At least a price drop would have made sense by now...

 

[Klueless]

Be careful tho, laptops are generally not designed to run 24/7, so it might die an early death...

Thank you, you've been most helpful : -)

 

[Klueless]

run that RDP system

Am I reading right? I went to set up Microsoft RDP (remote desktop) and I get a message I have to upgrade from Windows 10 Home to Windows 10 Pro! I guess I'm willing to spend the $99 to get this working but ... Really?

 

[L&LD]

Am I reading right? I went to set up Microsoft RDP (remote desktop) and I get a message I have to upgrade from Windows 10 Home to Windows 10 Pro! I guess I'm willing to spend the $99 to get this working but ... Really?

Yes, that is the unfortunate truth. While (almost) any version of Windows can use RDP to connect to another computer, that computer needs to be running Windows Pro to allow that connection to happen.

 

[Klueless]

Yes, that is the unfortunate truth. While (almost) any version of Windows can use RDP to connect to another computer, that computer needs to be running Windows Pro to allow that connection to happen

Wow! Thank you for the ultra quick feedback/answer!

 

[RMerlin]

TightVNC is a decent alternative to RDP.

 

[Lost Dog]

Try looking in to NoMachine. I've been using this pretty regularly at home. It has servers and clients for pretty much all operating systems. They have a pay model but I've always used the free versions.

 

[Klueless]

Just a quick update and a big "thank you"!

• We did go the Microsoft Remote Desktop route; automatic updates, ubiquitous clients, no muss pay model, etc.
• Everything is working, better than expected even.

Lesson learned; VPN is great but latency will kill some client/server database type apps.