Fished this monster out of a dumpster a few years back at work and always knew I’d probably do something with it, heard they make great gaming PCs but it’s so freaking loud I never even entertained that possibility.
it has 16x2.5" sata hdd bays, still has the iLO details and serial number card which I hear is uncommon for 2nd hand servers, hardware raid card because of the extra 8 bays and external scsi card.
my self hosting journy only started a few weeks back with a 2 bay synology nas and pi-hole (technically a few years with jellyfin on my main pc but you know …) so simple suggestions, preferably 100% local because I’m behind a CGNAT without ipv6 and it looks like a lot of work to deal with.
and if anyone knows what software is used on the SD slot and internal usb key, if anything, that would be great :) I’m assuming license keys for software or something equally unimportant because I’ve installed Proxmox to mess around with and it didn’t need them.
There’s nothing special about it. It’s just a (old) computer. I always recommend homelabbers just use regular PCs. Rack form factor servers have a use case and your closet or basement ain’t it. I’ve racked, stacked, and managed enough HP hardware to know not to bring any home. The people telling you to recycle it are correct.
This is why you think there’s nothing special about it. Yes, it’s a bad idea to run it as a server 24/7, but if you want to poke at a server BIOS, or play around with iLO, see how redundant power supplies or hot swap drive bays interact then yes there is some knowledge worth gaining there.
Fair enough. I’ll admit there is some PTSD from spending way too long inside data centers which gives me some bias. :)
That said, once OP has fiddled with it I still recommend shutting that sucker off. The noise and power bill will both be too high!