Suggestions for my server.

[Jihakuz]

Hey there ltt forum,

 

I'm in a slightly strange situation. I've just done some work experience for a tech company, who have just changed all their servers. They aren't really going to do anythung with them, so they gave one of their 1u servers, a sfp cable and an sfp nic to me. The server also has sfp

 

I already plan to put FreeNAS and run my Plex server from it but that's not really utilising the full potential of it, even thighj it is getting on ten years old now. 

 

I don't have the full specs to hand but I've got RAID card, 9TB of hhd storage, ~46GB of RAM and a couple old ish xeons. Again, I don't have the full specs to hand sadly. 

 

My question really is then, what do you suggest I run on it. I could run an email server from it but I don't have a domain. Maybe some form of Internet caching if possible. I also do not want to run an ad block on it. 

 

Thanks in advance, 

Jihakuz

[Windows7ge]

If it has a RAID card you won't want to use FreeNAS. ZFS wants direct access to the drives and RAID cards interfere with that.

 

I would say why not a multitude of different things? Install a hypervisor (if you don't want to buy an HBA then I would recommend ESXi). This would allow you to run multiple virtual systems on the server.

[FredyBobJoe]

Run nextcloud to make your own personal cloud with a nice interface, this can be done inside freenas or on its own vm.

[Sevilla]

You could run ESXI on it and create VMs for all the applications you want, however like @Windows7ge mentioned, don't use FreeNAS with a raid card. FreeNAS works best when it's using it with an HBA. If you're lucky, the raid card can be flashed to work as an HBA, but that's 100% dependant on what card it is.