Hosting appications on Intel NUC

2024-08-18

Make self hosting great again...

I used to run different servers on my beefy PC or on Synology. It's expensive, it interferes with other stuff, and is understandably unreliable. As the whole system became sluggish and inevitably unusable, it's about time to seek a cheap alternative, but of course, without the compromise of performance.

There are 2 dominant headless systems, Raspberry Pi and Intel NUC (unfortunately Intel would no longer build this). There are also mini PCs which I think will flood the market soon due to the discontinue of NUC. I was going to host various applications, some of which are quite CPU intensive such as 4k video transcoding & AI/ML. Also, I was lazy and wasn't in the hacking mood so I decided to go with NUC. It has been a year and everything has been great so far. I don't recall any issue and most the setup was one time so I totally recommend NUC. Here is my system.

  • Hardware

    • Intel Nuc or a similar model. Make sure it has a Wifi adapter unless you have a spare one.
    • SSD drive. Make sure it's compatible with your NUC.
    • Memory. Same as above.
    • Dummy Monitor Plug (you will run NUC headless so it needs a display emulator).

  • NUC setup

    • For the initial set up, connect NUC to a monitor.
    • Install Ubuntu on NUC via USB drive.
    • Install xrdp on NUC for remote access. It looks like xrdp is now part of Ubuntu 24+ by default (I run an older version of Ubuntu and can't confirm yet). And you need to create another account for remote access, xrdp doesn't allow to connect as a root user. But once you are connected, you are in full control and can su.
    • Unplug the monitor, attach the Dummy Monitor Plug. Now NUC is running headless and you can remotely control via Remote Desktop on PC or Mac. Have fun with the "bare metal".

  • Some other setup

    • I use NUC purely for applications. Data is on RAID systems (Synology specifically) and I have a cron job that mounts Synology NFS share to Ubuntu. In this set up, data and applications are truly isolated. Synology and NUC do what they're best at, and the systems are flying.