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?
Servers aren’t all that different from regular PCs. Plug in at least one PSU, boot install media, install your OS and off you go.
The neatest feature is the idrac. Hook that up to the network (and use the front panel to make sure it’s on DHCP) and you can do a lot of remote control, even get a virtual console, just like having a monitor, mouse, and keyboard.
Note that the R720 is rather old at this point. I’d install Windows first, and put the service tag in on Dell’s support site, and update all the firmware. There are other ways, but that one requires the least fiddling.
Also, once you have it up and running, you can see power consumption in the idrac.
And the fans will be pretty loud, so you’ll want to set up the idrac and use ipmitool to control them. I used to set mine to about 20%. You will need to do this on each cold boot (but not warm reboots). https://serverfault.com/questions/1025601/control-or-reduce-fan-speed-of-dell-r820