Solusun

I dont know how to reverse engineer a driver. I also would like to not take it apart and put in a different network adapter. But I will ask them for an updated driver and see if they support solus.

Also in a production environment you will want at least 2 different domain controllers, but for testing purposes one is fine, reason being if one AD controller gets messed up the domain can still function.

to be honest you dont sound like you have the knowledge you need to setup and maintain a server like this in a safe way.
 
if you want to save yourself a lot of hassle just get a ready made solution from Synology which has an interface even normal people can work with and has many other features like high availability and failover modes without requiring you to be an expert on it.

Go fire up a server 2016 vm and make it a domain controller. Make a few windows 10 vms as clients and add them to the domain. Then make some groups and add permissions. Try settting some group policys. Add some drive and see how storage spaces works.
 
If you can get that all down look at ordering a server from dell or simmilar.

how much do you know? How are you planning to learn. Id say you can use it in a day or two if you know basics around it, but from the amount of knowledge you seem to have something will go wrong.

question is how much is uptime worth to you. You can get it to work for cheap, but how much is it gonna cost you in a year or two when something happens and there is no server for a few days.
 
If you want to go diy, id get something like a r540 from dell, get server 2016 on it, get like 8x6tbhdds, a ssd boot. That should be around 6-10k. and have support from dell.

Also 20TB of archival spare under 6k is possible just for the server alone, not sure what your networking is, if you want a UPS and redundant power
If you need to more space to grow costs add up quickly, a 12TB drive is ~500 for a SAS or SATA one, and you would want to be running RAID 6 or RAID 10 unless you want to dabble into Storage Spaces and ReFS (but would still be a software version of RAID 10 or 6).
However ReFS doesn't have the same level of NTFS permissions, but prevents against bitrot.

really, find someone that knows what there doing. I have worked with a few companys where the tech guy runs IT, and it just turns into a mess and is run wrong.

I would agree, it sounds like you don't know exactly what you are doing, and fixing a mistake is more expensive than having someone set it up right in the first place.

do you have a budget for this server? How much storage space do you need?
 
Id look into a IT service provider. Have someone around that knows this well is a good idea and well worth the money to have a good network.

you sure about that network speed? Is that local? What cables are you running to clients?
 
A cache really won't help you here. SSDS are best for random io, and files like this will work on a hd array.

you can use a cache, but for the use you listed its very unlikely a cache will help at all.
 
How big are the files? Whats the network speed.

Then setup windows 10 clients. Setup windows 2016 as a domain controller and a file server and set permissions and groups.

What are the client systems doing?
 
The normall setup is windows server and windows 10 for the desktops. Its the most supported for desktop workstations and works well.

What os are you using.
 
Google it, but it lets you easily manage permissions and administor computers. It makes a business network work much better and almost every business uses them for the computers.

You can do this all with permissions, and your router will make it so nothing outside you network can connect to the server. Having a internet connection is a good idea for administration and updates.
 
You probably want to setup active directory here.