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?
Thanks for all the advice. Multiple people have mentioned the noise and power consumption, which is a shame as I don’t have anywhere out of the way to stick it.
I did see the mention of idrac, but knowing it needs the extra Ethernet cable is helpful. Is it like logging into the router to change configs?
Depending on the license it has it should let you power on and off the server, see the screen (even if there is no monitor attached) and control it and could let you remotely attach ISOs to install an OS. You can get away with a small cheap gigabit switch to plug both the server and ipmi/idrac and also the network cable to your router, keep in mind adding a lot of those to the network may degrade it, but a single switch won’t harm much. The correct business practice should be separate vlans on a fancier switch and lacp uplinks, absolutely overkill for home use.