Headless Servers

The systemd service coolercontrold runs in a headless way. The GUI program, coolercontrol, is a program that needs to connect to the daemon. The daemon binds to localhost and port 11987 by default. Likewise, the daemon's Web UI at http://localhost:11987/ serves the UI files to your browser directly.

If you have a headless server, a machine with only a terminal interface, or other external machines, and you want to control their cooling devices one of the easiest options is to use an SSH Tunnel:

For example:

ssh -L 11987:127.0.0.1:11987 user@remote-machine.ip

That will forward the port on the remote server to your local machine, allowing you to access the UI in the browser or the Desktop Application, as if it were running locally on your machine.

Note #1: Make sure the daemon is not running locally on the machine you're connecting from, as it may connect to the local daemon instead of the remote machine's daemon.

Note #2: The Linux Nvidia tools, unlike AMD, are closely tied to the display server. There have been some reported issues in cases where there is no display server at all, that the Nvidia tools don't work to control the fans. One would have to test this manually to verify fan control indeed works.

Note #3: The daemon is bound by default only to the loopback interface for security and safety reasons. If you want network access to the daemon you can either use the SSH Tunneling method above, or setup a proxy with proper SSL/TLS certificates. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TLS_termination_proxy

You can configure the daemon address, and port and point the UI to whatever address you've setup or are forwarding. For the daemon the settings are to be put in the config file: /etc/coolercontrol/config.toml. i.e.:

[settings]
port = 11987
ipv4_address = "127.0.0.1"
ipv6_address = "::1"

For the UI they're present in the UI in the Daemon settings section.