I’m not tech illiterate, but it’s also not my job or anything. That said I managed to figure out how to get a synology up and running and it hosts my Jellyfin and *arrs. Nothing too exciting. I also have a couple of vps’s that I use for nextcloud, a recipe server, all in docker containers. Not nothing but also, not the hardest thing to accomplish.
Well, my manager gifted me an old Dell PowerEdge R720 and 4 hard drives. Yeah, this is way more than I know what to do with, or even where to start. Do I need to plug both power cables in? I still need to figure out how to get a monitor hooked up to it with what looks to be a VGA cable. And even then this thing is a behemoth and what do I even do with it?? My manager was so excited to talk to me about it and I’m all 😵💫
Where do I start?
Find a remote part of your house where all the noise won’t interfere, it also can increase your power bill if left on all the time, you can lower the power consumption via UEFI settings at the cost of performance. Usually you can power up and down dell servers from idrac, it’s another ethernet cable you have to add to your networking, sometimes the servers have a license on the idrac that allows you to install everything via network, sometimes you don’t even need a usb and can use virtual media. If idrac doesn’t work, try Wake on LAN, it’s a special packet you have to send to its mac address via the network and it will power up the server when needed. Learn about RAID levels and decide what to do with those disks, decide if you want to prioritize space or performance. Get a usb drive and install Ventoy on it, it will make it way easier to try different linux distros, or windows, you just copy the ISO files instead of formatting the usb every time. Virtualization stuff like proxmox would be a great start if you want to learn that, specially if you find something that requires multiple OS, or you can just install a normal distro and go the container route. Things that are way faster to do on your server vs your NAS would be transcoding to reduce storage consumption of media files.