As another Idea,
There is a PIA virtual machine which acts as a gateway.
I have it setup on my N54L on a virtual machine (using esxii) with 2 virtual adapters only 1 physical NIC.
Then just set your DHCP to advertise the virtual machine as the gateway and all your traffic will funnel through the virtual machine and be encrypted. And it can be anywhere on the network. Also means you can have a few gateways setup for different devices if you like. Then you can jump between networks just by changing your gateway.

Edit: Link
https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/forum/discussion/1389/pia-tunnel-a-virtual-machine-vpn-tunnel

Currently the obvious alternative to Dell T20 is the HPE ML10 Gen9, HPE are running a cashback this month, which makes the ML10 cheaper overall. I've played a bit with both systems, and they both have pros and cons, however, if I were getting one for a home server/NAS application I'd go for the HPE ML10.

Although the build quality of the HPE ML10 isn't as good as the Dell T20, it does have a newer/higher performing CPU (Pentium G4400 vs. Pentium G3220), it can take more RAM (64GB vs. 32GB), it has more on-board SATA ports (6 vs. 4) and the case can take more 3.5" HDDs (6/7 vs. 4), The ML10 also has a lower idle power (16W vs. 19W)

It can take 4 x 3.5" drives and 2 x 2.5" drives and DOES make a good NAS. How many more bays do you need?

If this had more HDD bays, it would make a decent NAS.

No Dell cashback this month?

No, only on the Xeon versions which are more expensive unfortunately. This still being cheaper even with the cashback on the better systems.

"Queue debate about G4400 being used in a server..."
Queue debate about eBuyer? :stuck_out_tongue:
Ah, see you've changed description!

"32 GB (max)" (memory).
Hmmm. Tempted to upgrade trusty NL36 VM box as that's limited to 16GB.
Heat.

LOL yes I don't know why I put that, I'd been looking at other servers as well! Point still stands that queue debate and I think it will be fine and upgradeable in the future :-)

I've got 8gb in my N54L so can instantly upgrade the T20 and can upgrade if needed in the future.

N54L processor is soldered onto the board but this isn't which means I can make it more powerful further down the line. Currently it (N54L) struggles a bit with x265 decoding (use it as a HTPC on my TV also).

Got one of these, seems pretty good. Need to add a dual nic so that I can use it as a vpn router, my real router isn't fast enough.

Does any one know if this mini tower could be easily upgraded to use for top end gaming?

bought this last year for £99 after cashbook from Server plus. decent server.

Sorry, cant type this morning

Bought one of these minus the HDD for £75 after Dell cashback a while back on a previous offer, dropped in a cheap Xeon E3-1220 (£45) from ebay....lacking some pretty basic server features though like a Dual NIC and DRAC , still not a bad little server for the money though.

Currently the obvious alternative to Dell T20 is the HPE ML10 Gen9, HPE are running a cashback this month, which makes the ML10 cheaper overall. I've played a bit with both systems, and they both have pros and cons, however, if I were getting one for a home server/NAS application I'd go for the HPE ML10.

Although the build quality of the HPE ML10 isn't as good as the Dell T20, it does have a newer/higher performing CPU (Pentium G4400 vs. Pentium G3220), it can take more RAM (64GB vs. 32GB), it has more on-board SATA ports (6 vs. 4) and the case can take more 3.5" HDDs (6/7 vs. 4), The ML10 also has a lower idle power (16W vs. 19W)

What's a 'queue debate'?

Etiquette of queuing in the UK?

very tempted to upgrade my little n40 .. fact is it does what i ask it to do (often slowly) .. but im sure i could make it do more

Out of interest what OS you thinking of using?? Currently have WHS 2011.. which does all that i want.. I no pretty much any OS can be used for cloud / file sharing / streaming functions with out to much fuss..

BUT WHS = backups are awesome!

getting a new copy of WHS - almost impossible! Any suggestions? main thing i need is easy automated backups of win7 + win10 setups....

​Didn't know it had that many. lookong at the spec sheet showed 1 free bay with the 500gb HDD.

Hi Op, which graphics card do you have for this machine? i am tempted to get one too..

The Reality is that in 99% of installs the Server OS ( 2012 R2 or 2016) add nothing that a domestic user would need that isn't now included in the desktop versions of Win8.1/10

What functionally of 2012 R2 are you using that you couldn't do with Win10?

I'm running a copy of 2016 Standard on one of my servers at home but when I think about it I can't think of anything it's doing that I couldn't If it had Win10 on it..:smiley:



Or Win10 and Classicshell

yeah i can certainly setup a win7 or 10 environment, but wasn't sure if i was then asking a car to do the job of a van!
how about automated backups of network computers? (im sure it can be done, but not looked into it).. Not worried about bluray etc.. if i replaced my server it would be doing what it does now........ Daily backups of network machines + file sharing (mainly movies / music to tv)




Yeah I saw 2012 essential is the replacement and the COST!! can it be used in the same way WHS connector setup for backups?

I don't backup at the minute to be honest, films/music/downloads are 'fodder' as in I wouldn't be devastated if I lost them and my photos and important info are all cloud backed up (Google Drive).

I know Windows has a plethora of backup programs however so you shouldn't have a problem.

i use one of these as a desktop with an AMD R7 240 graphics card that was about £50 or so, as it was one of the highest performing cards with a low power consumption to suit the PSU. I wouldn't have otherwise bothered, I mainly got that as the DVDI output didn't have sound to use with an HDMI adapter

I stuck a couple more SATA cards in and managed to squeeze at least 2 or 3 more drives in than standard. in the optical bay I put an SSD for boot drive and 1tb 2.5" drive I had spare, plus a couple of 6tb drives and an 8TB, a 2TB and one or two 3 or 4tb drives and it runs fine using windows 10, although on the beta testing thing the updates have had issues a couple of times but nothing too bad - no need to reinstall. I added a cheap USB soundcard to give optical out and use a USB caddy with a laptop dvd writer when I need to use discs

I have been looking a while to get some extra RAM but finding it hard to get a good deal. ideally I want to buy 8gb sticks at a time and gradually fill it with 32gb, and upgrade the processor to something quad core and that will run more VM's than the G3220, but it's been a good machine the last few months. I would have preferred if it had a full size optical bay and sound with the DVI but it's not a huge problem

I need a i3 desktop PC bundle but haven't seen any recently posted, soon good deals in the past from Tesco for under £300 but nothing in over a month. Anyone see any please let me know.

I'm not bypassing the router, I just want to encrypt everything that goes through it and it just isn't powerful enough (I get about 15mb with openVPN). Instead I want this to sit in between the router and my network, this would encrypt the traffic leaving my router to act as normal. Just need to work out what to do with the wireless, as that will then be outside the encrypted network.

Do you have a supported CPU list? All I can find just lists 3 CPUs:

Your system supports one of the following processors:
One Intel Xeon processor E3-1225v3
One Intel Pentium processor G3220
One Intel Pentium processor G3260

Wireless card in the PC, second router or wireless access point would be the only options unless your current router supports vlans.

Yes, it works in exactly the same way, there's a similar Dashboard where you can monitor/configure the backups for each client machine, and the main server backup. Installation/setup is a little more complex as it insists on creating a Domain, but if you're familiar with WHS 2011 it shouldn't be too much of a culture shock.

OK. I bought one of these from ServerPlus in November 2015. I also bought a 128GB SSD, made that the boot drive and installed Windows 10 and office on that. I've since add 16GB RAM (now has 20GB) and a GTX 750ti graphics card. Last week I upgraded the CPU to the Xeon E3-1231v3. There are a number of CPUs that will work with this, I can confirm the E3-1231vs works fine (quad core 3.4 Ghz, 3.8Ghz on boost) but remember this does not have a built in GPU so you will need a separate graphics card. The next upgrade will be a better graphics card, the 750ti has a 75w drain and I believe the 1050 and 1050ti also have the same power consumption so I can still do something within the limited PSU. So I think you can get up to a 1050ti at best at present but maybe in the future there will be better low powered cards.

Almost forgot, also added a 3TB drive for games etc.

There are two main reasons why I use Windows Server rather than a Windows client OS. The first is stability, MS are much more careful with updates/patches for the Server OSes, and I'd run pretty much anything else than Windows 10 with it's ridiculous update policy on a server that is supposed to be running 24/7. Then there are the tools to manage users and Windows Client PC backups etc. In my household there are a number of Windows PCs, and twice the bare metal restore facility in WHS/WS Essentials has saved a lot of grief when a PC has killed itself (Windows 10 update again) or been toasted by it's user.
It's possible to set up Windows 10 Pro to do a lot of what you get OOTB with the server OSes, especially if you're prepared to invest the time to investigate/setup 3rd party software (backup etc.), but I prefer having it all done for me.

yeah i do have the original setup (and key somewhere) I agree i am very tempted in just sticking to what i know works... that being said... everyone likes an upgrade? and if i did go for another OS would mean my little n40 whs could stay as a backup backup.. or more likely go to friend who wants to do the same




Yeah no doubt bit of diggin i could get win 7 or 10 to do what WHS does and probably more...




thanks for the feedback.. the cost is still a bit to digest but if backups work like whs it maybe worth considering


thanks again for all the feedback given... :smiley:

If memory serves the downside to this is there are not SATA connector to connect to on the motherboard - so while it has the slots you cant use all the discs as per HP Gen8 unless you buy a SATA card.

Anyone confirm and recommend a SATA card

Reckon running Commander Keen or Fantasy World Dizzy would be pushing it then? :smile:

Wireless only encrypts between the router and client, not through the router, unless it's between wireless clients. Even then, the traffic is decrypted when it gets to the router and encrypted before it leaves the router. If traffic comes from a wireless client to go to the internet the router decrypts before sending it to the internet.

If you want to encrypt everything that traverses the network you have to make everything wireless for locally-encrypted comms and use a VPN client on the router to encrypt everything that goes to the internet (or just use a VPN client on each wireless client). If you use a VPN client on each wireless client just make sure you don't disable local LAN access.

VLANs don't do any encryption, they just logically separate traffic.

The VPN client on the router is too slow, hence me thinking of using this as a VPN router that then passes off traffic to the main router. If I added a wireless card to this it could probably work as such.

All scenarios I mentioned would be routing the traffic through the PC which is acting as a VPN gateway. So everything would be encrypted.

The T20 has physical space for 4x3.5" and 2x2.5"

It has 4 SATA data ports. If you want more you need a PCI expansion card

It only has 4 sata power connectors and they are basically custom for the mobo so you need to daisychain if you want more power connectors.
The sata power cables are not long enough to reach the 2.5" slots, so you need to buy the dell cable for £20-£30 or buy some cheap sata extenders.

I'm using 2.5" drives and mounting like this, with 2 others in the top bays

http://homeservershow.com/forums/index.php?/topic/7492-easy-mod-to-add-more-25-or-35-drives-to-a-t20/page-5

I used to have them suspended like this but moved them: http://homeservershow.com/forums/index.php?/topic/7492-easy-mod-to-add-more-25-or-35-drives-to-a-t20/

You can also do this: http://homeservershow.com/forums/index.php?/topic/11134-8-drive-setup/

2.5" drives are great. Quieter, lower power, and you won't overload the cables if you daisy chain.

Sorry, I saw "PC" and thought you were talking about the client PC.

Obviously that means you can't use wired clients though so if you do that I'd suggest running a VPN server on the PC (VPN box) to encrypt over the wire, for internet-bound traffic, so that you can then extend this to your wireless setup (if one exists). The only caveat to this would be that traffic between clients on the internal network would have to route via the VPN box. This would break NetBIOS, Bonjour, mDNS, etc. though unless the VPN box also runs a Avahi or similar.

You're on the right track. VPN (encryption) is CPU-intensive so you'll need something with a decent amount of grunt. Moving the VPN from the router will move the encryption to a different CPU and that may increase performance. Saying that though, the VPN provider may be the limiting factor too, especially if you're connecting via a VPN server in a different continent.

There's a decent thread at the Air-VPN forums that explains throughput using different CPUs. Many routers can't do more than 15-20Mbps, especially if using AES. If you are using AES it might be a good idea to check that the CPU you intend to use can do hardware-based AES encryption. Unfortunately the G3220 doesn't, but it would still outperform most consumer routers.

These threads get difficult sometimes and it's easy to miss information.

The guy said he was using a Dual NIC. Therefore the wired clients would be encrypted as well, as long as they are pointing to the correct gateway.

All we are talking here is a PC in between the network and the router. Instead of the usual scenario where everything points at the router you are pointing everything at the PC. The PC then fires it out to the router via the VPN. This means all internal network protocols will work as normal just like any other internal network.

The PC needs two ethernet points and one wireless to cover all bases. Or three ethernet points should you want a DMZ or a network running outside the VPN.

Nice find, thanks.

I'd be surprised if you had any issues with comparability of processors, I put in an i5 4590s (I wanted more grunt without having to worry about the power supply or cooling) and it worked straight away no need to even update the BIOS.

As another Idea,
There is a PIA virtual machine which acts as a gateway.
I have it setup on my N54L on a virtual machine (using esxii) with 2 virtual adapters only 1 physical NIC.
Then just set your DHCP to advertise the virtual machine as the gateway and all your traffic will funnel through the virtual machine and be encrypted. And it can be anywhere on the network. Also means you can have a few gateways setup for different devices if you like. Then you can jump between networks just by changing your gateway.

Edit: Link
https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/forum/discussion/1389/pia-tunnel-a-virtual-machine-vpn-tunnel

Why do they still put USB 2 ports on these boxes? I believe the front has 2 x USB 2.0 and 2 x USB 3.0, USB 3.0 is supposedly backward compatible so why not 4 x 3.0? Is it somehow due to cost or something obvious that I'm overlooking.

good price

I agree, it's hard to follow sometimes :smiley:

If the wired clients use a switch to connect to the VPN box though they'll be unencrypted on the LAN unless they route via the VPN box. On a L2 domain they don't 'route' so they won't have to send traffic to the VPN box for it to reach another wired client, hence suggesting using the VPN box as a server as well as a client for internet-bound traffic.

It really depends on what needs to be encrypted though, so it may be acceptable to use unencrypted comms on the local LAN.

​I prefer using Ethernet modems for this, you can easily get ADSL ones cheap, VDSL ones arent much more, the white BT ECI ones they used to install before the combined modem routers came out.

If I were you I'd just replace the router. I've got an old ivybridge desktop board with a dual gigabit NIC card acting as my router using pfsense. Lovely to use and I've got a gigabit connection which I can actually max out (well, I've seen 910 down 940 up, good enough). Not sure how it'd handle VPNs but it's got a quad core so should be fine for high bandwidth. I still need wifi of course so there's a WRT1900ACS in AP-only mode for that.

If you need to handle some incoming connection that isn't ethernet either 1) get an add in card for the PC or 2) set your current router to modem only mode and let the new PC based router do the proper routing.

To add to this, I run pfSense on a Celeron N3050. On my 200/12 circuit it has no problem, and terminating a VPN and IPv6 tunnel I get no performance issues. The VPN gives me around 70Mbps down and hits my upload limit so any of the listed CPUs for this Dell box would have no problem.

Though not officially supported you can add quite a wide range of CPUs - I'm running an i7-4790 with normal DDR3 memory (you need to take out the ECC if you want use none supported CPUs). I've also replaced the power supply with an EVGA 500w and added an EVGA Nvidia 1060 OC and still runs near silently (running win10)

Damnit, I have 16Gb ECC in mine I don't fancy replacing! Thanks for that, potentially saved me a few quid.

Oh - yes if you've already got it stick with the ECC. If you're considering upgrading power supply the only gotcha I came across (which wasn't mentioned on any forums) is that the new power supply is longer than the original Dell one - which means you have to remove the side locking mechanism (and there's no room to reattach once you got the psu in). Other than that it's been a great machine - really quiet and (touch wood) very reliable.

https://forums.redacted.tv/threads/how-to-build-a-100-gaming-pc-guide-benchmarks.1314/

for gaming on a refurbished server. i did this and it rocks. 1080p ultragaming pc bought for £300 using dell t7500 server and rx470

Was looking at replacing a Hp micro severe 54l with one of these. I have 6x hdd and 2x ssd in my microserver. Is there anyway I can do the same in the T20?

Got* yes :smiley:

54L doing good, plus like the power consumption too and small form factor and noise.

T20 would just be upgrade for the processor really

Yeah mine has struggles on transcoding and playback on x265 has been an issue and needs more cpu.

Kudos for fitting that much into such a small box! :-)

Bought another one today.

On the previous one I installed a SSD and junked the mechanical HD, installed Win 10 Pro and after a few driver downloads and updates it was good to go. I added a 750ti and 16GB RAM later.

6 months later it is silent and good enough to order more. If this next one stacks up on another task I will order 8 more for use as PCs.

any good as a ftp server

I can't see any issue, from what I'm aware you don't need anything special as it just hosts files. Depending on what you're holding size of HDDs might the important part

Expired.