Upgrade an old Intel NUC to run Monitoring On-Prem

[markcheret3381 (mark.cheret)]

For the longest time, I’ve been running Spiceworks and Manage Engine Desktop Central along other monitoring and security surveillance tooling inside a virtual machine on my TrueNAS box. If there’s an outage with my NAS, the monitoring solution will go down with it. So I decided to upgrade a legacy Intel® NUC Kit DCCP847DYE to do the job independently of any other component in the network.

• Total time: 2 hours
• Estimated cost: $100

Step 1: Order the components for the upgrade

In this How-To my situation is that I’m upgrading an Intel NUC from 4GB of RAM and a 32GB mSATA SSD.

Using the Intel® Product Compatibility Tool I selected

• a 240 GB mSATA SSD
• an additional 4GB 1333 MHz RAM module

Order the compatible components with the specs you want.

Step 2: Install the components

Unplug your NUC to upgrade the components

• Loosen the 4 screws in the corners on the bottom of the device
• remove the tiny screw holding the mSATA SSD in place
• replace it with the new mSATA SSD
• put the screw back
• install the additional RAM or replace the existing ones

Step 3: Install Windows 10

Since we just installed a blank harddrive into our NUC, we need to install Windows 10 as our operating system to run Spiceworks and other Network Inventory and Management software.

• Put Windows 10 on a bootable USB stick by downloading and running the Microsoft Windows Media Creation Tool for Windows 10
• Plug the newly created stick into your NUC
• Boot it up and run the Windows 10 installation

Step 4: Install Chrome and debloat Windows 10

Once Windows 10 is up and running, install Chrome and use one of the many available toolkits to get rid of a lot of the bloatware shipping with Windows 10.

• Install Google Chrome
• Run the debloater as described on Sycnex/Windows10Debloater on GitHub
  In the debloater GUI I go through the following steps:
• Remove all Bloatware
• Disable Cortana
• Stop Edge PDF Takeover
• Uninstall OneDrive
• Unpin Tiles from Start Menu
• Disable Telemetry/Tasks
• Remove Bloatware Regkeys
• Reboot

Step 5: Adjust Computer name and Domain join

Spiceworks and other Monitoring/Management solutions are most fun when the systems are joined to your Domain.

• Rename this little Intel NUC box according to your organisation’s naming convention. In my case, I chose the name DevSecOps
• Reboot
• Join the domain
• Reboot
• Logon as a Domain Administrator
• Allow Remote Desktop Connections

Step 6: Install or move Spiceworks

Now that we’re all settled, we can remotely connect to the PC via Remote Desktop and install Spiceworks or move it over from an existing installation.

• Move Your Spiceworks Desktop Installation
• Or Install Spiceworks

Step 7: Install or move Manage Engine Desktop Central

If you’ve been running Manage Engine Desktop Central on your existing VM, you can move it to your Intel NUC or give it a spin. It’s really neat Patch Management for your whole network and allows you to start and shut down machines via smartphone app as well.

• Migrating Desktop Central server
• Or Download Manage Engine Desktop Central

That’s it. You can now put the little box in your lab server rack or other central networking component enclosure, give it some power and network and access its services from anywhere you want on your network. I’m going to try a few more products for scanning the network or data security tools as well as other development and security helpers. One I have in my head straight away is Tree Size that could run data usage reports on our network shares. Apart from that I’m thinking about running Greenbone Security in a virtual machine on that device.