Why you should buy a NUC for staking | ETHStaker Ethereum Validator Hardware Shopping

Transcript

Sure. So, one of the first things that I want to ask is people told me that if I wanted to run a solo validator, I need to have what's called a NUC or NUC, not sure how to properly say that out loud yet. But, uh what is that and why would I use that as opposed to say my regular computer? Good question. Who wants to take that? Not everybody at once. So, I have a biased take on that. Um the NUC is a convenience. It takes a It's a small form factor PC, really compact, right?

Intel and AMD make them. Uh I think on AMD it's not actually AMD, it's ASUS, but same difference. Um they usually run a little hotter because they're tiny. Um they typically are meant um for like this kind of lightweight operation. You typically find like four and six core CPUs in there. Um you find memory that does not tell you when it breaks. Um and it's not really built for um remote operation. So, it's not home server gear. It's a small mini PC. Think like a Mac mini, but in the PC world.

Okay. So, basically it's like a little mini computer that allows me to do specific things easier as opposed to like a wide range of things like a regular uh computer would. It will allow you to do all the things a regular computer does, minus maybe putting a you know, mega Nvidia card in there and playing whatever the kids play these days. Um So, in in that way it's it's it's a real computer, but it you don't have to put it together, right? The amount of Lego you do is reduced. Maybe you put some RAM and an SSD in, but that's it, right?

Right. So, essentially are these like already pre-built or do you have to build them yourself or is can you do one or the other? Um two options really. One is you buy what's known as a barebones knock. It comes with the um with the motherboard, the case, the the power supply is usually built in, the CPU, everything in one. And then you slot in some RAM and you put in whatever storage you want, whatever SSD you want, right? And then you're done. So, a tiny amount of adult Lego. Um the other option is to buy it ready-made. The RAM and the SSD is already in and off you go.

Mhm. So, while you're doing that, I think one of the questions we should uh directly answer is and I think uh Mojo asked this in an earlier question uh but we didn't address it head-on. And that is what specifically, why can't I do this on my home PC? Why wouldn't I run this on uh our our daily runner? Why don't we want a separate clean system for our validator? Good question, yeah. Why indeed. YOLO, man. I could take this one. Um like one of the main reason you don't want to run your uh staking setup on your like personal machine that you use daily

is like the updates like like when you're going to be doing updates on your personal machines, maybe you don't want to restart your staking machine as well. So, I mean I I did this mistake myself. Eventually, I moved to to a dedicated hardware and then and so so that's one of the main reason I see um not to run your staking setup on your home machine. Even if you could do it even like even if like you you have some VM running around and then you have plenty of RAM, plenty of CPU, um it's it's not a good idea. You're much better running this on a dedicated machine and and the knock the knocks and the different small factor PCs are

pretty good for this. Oh, I'll I'll add a few ideas. One is that the staking software is written with Linux in mind. It can run on Windows, but Windows isn't easy mode for this. It's easy mode for client, but for this it's actually hard mode. It's harder to get this right on Windows. From getting the time sync right to making sure that actually starts when the machine starts, not when you log in because you don't want to have a situation where say, you know, you're away for the weekend, power goes out briefly, comes back. If this was a Linux machine, it would just run out run again. If if not, if it's Windows and it's not set to start on start, but it starts on login like most things do in Windows because it's a client machine,

not a server machine, right? Not a client OS, not a server OS. you've been down for the weekend or the week and you get the offline penalties for that. So, overall, all the guides, all the tooling is created in Linux. All the stuff that also automates it is in Linux with some exceptions. I know Remi, you have like the the Windows wizard. Um but for the most part, this is a whole lot easier to get right and to have up and running 24/7 and stable on a Linux machine.

And so, it it makes sense to have that be a separate machine, right? The other part is a security concern. But that security concern, I would say is actually less with the staking machine and more with the machine you use to interact with your crypto, which is if you're I'm sending crypto, receiving crypto, I may not want that to be the machine where I'm also doing adult entertainment and regular email and regular browsing because I'll get a Trojan at some point, you know, and it'll it'll steal my crypto. But that's less of a staking worry, that's more of a general where should I do crypto worry.

We we didn't verify this, but we have a very trustworthy report of a GPU miner who downloaded a an Ethereum GPU mining client that explored his network and extracted his validator keys. So, that's another reason why you would not want to run multiple more software than is necessary on your staking machine. And we're we're also we have a lots of instructions for hardening your staking machine so that that even if there is something on your network, it's not going to be able to get in.

And one other reason why you might want to use a dedicated dedicated machine is it's more like a a set and forget, right? You set up your machine, you put it somewhere, and you just forget about it mostly. Like, you still have to do updates, and then you still have to prune eventually, but it's much easier to think that way, I think. But, Remi, if I forget it, how will I know when it's down? How will I know when my validator isn't earning money? That's actually a question I was going to ask. That's a pretty good question, and and and maybe that's somewhat a little further from the hardware shopping that we've been talking about, but there's a bunch of monitoring tools that you could use.

The the beacon chain website has some pretty nice monitoring tools there. There's a bunch of Grafana dashboards and alerting that you can set up on your own machine, but there's a bunch of other stuff that you can set up once you you're done with your main validator uh configuration. chain is what I was aiming at, right? That that just that just solves it.