Brickfrog

No display at all? I suspect something else is at play there…

On that model during bootup

F2 = BIOS

F10 = Boot Menu

You should be seeing something in the Boot Menu, or at least be able to get into the BIOS?

Also double-check the USB formatting, I don’t remember if that NUC has UEFI boot support or if it needs to be enabled in the BIOS beforehand. e.g. if your USB is formatted to boot legacy then reformat it to boot in UEFI, or vice versa.

I actually have a few of those NUC models around but am not sure what it does exactly with no SSD, I think/thought it should still be able to handle USB boot in that situation.

Yup going to do that soon :)

Still on 4.x, bummer as I normally wait a while before doing major version software updates but it is what it is.

Has it been happening since qBittorrent 5.x ? Only reason I ask is that 5.0 did introduce a new feature per https://www.qbittorrent.org/news

FEATURE: Allow to move content files to Trash instead of deleting them (glassez)

Maybe double-check the qBittorrent settings and verify that isn’t somehow enabled? I’m not on on that version yet so can’t be sure how that new feature works or is configured.

If it’s not that then I suspect the other comments are right e.g. a hardlinked file elsewhere would defintiely mean you need to delete all the hardlinks to actually free up space.

they want to setup a server to host a simple “contact” website

Not sure what sort of uptime/reliability your friends are expecting out of a self hosted solution but for something like that you wouldn’t need much processing power, even a Raspberry Pi can host a simple website. Not sure what to recommend offhand but there are definitely vendors in that space that sell simple DIY “contact us” form software, or I guess if you wanted to roll your own that’s an option too. I’d be more concerned about keeping it locked down/secure.

Keep in mind for the internet your friends would likely need business class internet with multiple static IPs so you can give your little DIY box its own public IP address. Many (most?) residential internet service providers do not allow self hosting websites on their network and they’d be dynamic IP anyway though you could work around that somewhat with dynamic DNS since you’re going to need to purchase a domain name and point it to somewhere anyway.

run an e-mail service (about 10 accounts for now but with possibilities of expanding it to support more)

Like others said you really don’t want to go that route unless you’re well versed in that area. It would be annoying for a business especially a new one, those emails will likely keep going into other provider’s spam folders for a good period of time. All the big mainstream email providers are notorious for not trusting new email domains / new IP addresses.

Seems easier to just go to Google Workspace / Microsoft 365 / whatever other provider you like to use, presumably the business has a business use case for reliable email among other things.

Bonus: Those cloud services can easily host simple contact forms for you so maybe that’s your all in one solution. Look into Google Forms and similar.

and to store and remote access documents.

That sounds like the above commercial cloud solutions again :)

But sure technically you could go through the extra step hosting that yourself. Depends on how the business wants to use/access this stuff, it’s really a question for them. Could be as simple as a Windows server with RDP (if they’re Windows people & just want to log into something “windows” to browse/open files) or maybe multi-user Linux with VNC (the geeks might like, maybe not so much the general Windows/Mac users). Or if you’re trying to do something web oriented maybe something like Nextcloud if you want to do all this in a web browser.

You should triple check what exactly they are expecting when it comes to remote access documents… you really don’t want to spend the time setting up something that they totally weren’t expecting and end up hating.