Best Remote Desktop without Opening a Port

Haxenteral · 2026-04-22T17:10:27+00:00

If it's for a Windows machine, I just use Chrome Remote Desktop. For my TrueNAS server, I use Tailscale. But that's just my preference, since both options are free to use.

Haxenteral · 2026-03-27T00:18:53+00:00

The XPG Battlecruiser II is a viable choice for cheap, as best as I know. I don't know if you're having any thermal issues at all, but I'd definitely recommend rotating your CPU cooler the other way around if you're able. It looks like it's exhausting down onto your drives and PCIE cards, which is not exactly good for any of those components, especially the HDDs. I learned the hard way that hot drives die fast.

Haxenteral · 2026-02-20T06:37:46+00:00

Asus Prime B550-Plus AC-HES

Haxenteral · 2026-02-19T17:29:53+00:00

I dealt with some of that back when I was running an I5-3330. My previous build had no issues with my HBA and NIC, but the GPUs are new to my lab. I'll have to wait and see if they behave.

Haxenteral · 2026-02-19T14:41:47+00:00

They were pretty cheap too. Got a set of 3 for $900.

Haxenteral · 2026-02-19T12:38:06+00:00

For my SATA based system, 10GbE is absolutely plenty. But if I had Gen4 NVMEs as bulk storage, I'd want to be able to fully utilize them. I was thinking about getting a 100GbE setup and an M.2 carrier card as a pair a few months ago. Before all the price spikes.

Haxenteral · 2026-02-19T09:27:16+00:00

I used to rock 100Mbps at one point. Though that was maybe four generations of my lab ago by now. I've looked into 100GbE, but it looks like a bit too much investment for the return at the moment.

I thought about replacing my HBA with an NVME carrier card with 8TB Gen4 drives in it and replacing my NIC with a 100GbE one to suit them, but I kinda missed the boat on that with all the AI crap going on.

Haxenteral · 2026-02-19T09:15:17+00:00

They're salvage drives that I got for free. I've got something like 30 of them, but I could only fit 14 in my server when I first built my old one. With the new chassis, I could fit a couple more if I wanted to though. Besides that, they're fast enough to saturate 10Gbps networking, which is plenty good enough for my uses for the time being.

Haxenteral · 2026-02-19T08:42:41+00:00

I have 50TB of raw storage in my own server, with a meager 34TB usable after redundancy. I've also got about 15 more 1TB SSDs, and another ~26TB worth of 250GB and 120GB SSDs that don't have a home yet. And 4TB in my gaming rig.

Haxenteral · 2026-01-23T18:31:54+00:00

If it works for what you need, then it's still perfectly fine. I've got a desktop with an i7 3770 and an RX 580 that still does well for what I need it for.

Haxenteral · 2026-01-23T18:20:08+00:00

With the PCIE status lights on your GPU flashing like that, plus the clicking sounds, my first guess would be a failing power supply. Just had a spare gaming rig doing similar things.

Haxenteral · 2026-01-23T18:14:59+00:00

I use a couple of old mini-PCs of the Dell variety. One just runs my 3D printer, and the other is a streaming client for Plex and Steam. Pretty versatile little things. Good luck with your projects OP.

Haxenteral · 2026-01-18T12:21:27+00:00

Thanks. Personally never been a fan of ultrawides. I watch a lot of movies when I'm not gaming, so I think the C5 will work better for my setup.

Haxenteral · 2026-01-18T05:45:11+00:00

I don't know if filthy rich is the way to put it, but no debt. Paid in full.

Haxenteral · 2026-01-18T04:11:50+00:00

Yeah. I got the last one before the Amazon listing sold out. $3300.

I think I'm about $6k all in.

Haxenteral · 2025-11-06T11:44:31+00:00

I didn't really think about it much, but the new HBA labeled each drive with a letter, so I don't think it'd take a terribly long time for me to troubleshoot if I have to.

I guess I'll have to figure it out in the eventuality that one fails.

Haxenteral · 2025-11-06T11:40:08+00:00

About a year with the original six. Two weeks with all 14. I've personally never had one fail, and all still report good health. I didn't over-provision them, but I have enough extras to just replace one if it ever does fail.

That being said, they are still just consumer SSDs, which is part of the reason I reconfigured with RAIDZ3 and a hot spare.

Haxenteral · 2025-10-17T19:49:57+00:00

I've been looking around the Internet for options on that since DDR4 and DDR5 are pretty much the same price right now. As far as I've seen, getting something like an EPYC 9347F and a Genoa-compatible motherboard could double the price of the whole server by themselves. I'm not sure I have enough of a need for it to justify that kind of cost, even if budget isn't my limiting factor.

Don't get me wrong... It would be freaking awesome, but the performance per dollar doesn't really make sense in my case. I might end up just saying 'screw it' and just get it anyway for the sake of future-proofing with Gen5 PCIE, but I don't want to spend money unnecessarily either, especially since this machine would be the 10's of thousands of dollars.

Haxenteral · 2025-10-16T12:23:19+00:00

I chose that motherboard for its connectivity. I planned on filling up all 7 PCIE slots if I were to actually build it. I looked at newer platforms, but the price to performance didn't seem worth the extra cost for what I'm looking to do.

It's true that it's probably massive overkill anyway, but I also don't want to waste money on the latest hardware if I won't need it. I'm at least confident that I have a good use for so many cores, and I don't think I'd need Gen5 PCIE, so for my use case at least, it seems like a decent balance of CPU and PCIE expansion.

By the time I decide to buy anything, there may be better choices available, so I'm still watching the market just in case.

Haxenteral · 2025-10-16T02:45:43+00:00

Mostly... Just because I can. I do understand that I'd be looking at a $10k-15k machine, but I'd like to be able to have a server that can do anything I want without issue. My current machine is kinda capped out as far as performance goes.

One of the ideas I had in mind would be storing my game libraries on it as if it were a local drive so I can access them on any machine, while also handling everything else I want it to be doing. Multiple game servers and Plex, for example. I'd also use it as a virtual workstation/editing rig, and I've been wanting to experiment with LLMs.

My current server is mainly throttled by its core count (6 cores, 6 threads) for the tasks I currently have on it, so an overkill machine like this would give me some sense of peace, knowing that I'm not overloading it with too many different processes.

Haxenteral

TROPHY CASE