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?
The multiple power supplies are for redundancy. It will work with one plugged in but you are “supposed” to plug in both.
It’s fundamentally not that different from a consumer desktop. Plug in a monitor and a keyboard and a USB with your preferred flavor of headless Linux installer on it. Configure ssh as the first thing you do because you won’t want to plug the monitor and keyboard into it every time you need to tweak something.
You can probably find VGA to HDMI adapters if you can’t find a monitor with VGA support.