I know, you get this post all the time. Perhaps additional context will help separate me from all the other posts.

I won some great equipment at a local City auction recently, most notably a couple of PowerEdge R430s. They have dual Xeon E5-2620 procs in them with 32GB RAM. They pulled the drives, but my buddy is dropping by a handful of old server SSDs that I can throw in them.

Now, I’m trying to get some ideas on what I can use at least one of them for (will probably resell the remaining equipment I got in the score.

Current focuses are on learning web dev (learning Angular and JS right now). I have gig internet from Spectrum with my own modem/router. I have access to Windows licenses etc. I’m just not sure what to do with this thing now that I have it.

I welcome your suggestions, both serious and in jest.

Thanks in advance.

  • onlyati@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    I think that server is overkill for you. If you would like to learn webdev, you can simply use your PC. But it is up to you, having dedicated development machine has its advantages.

    But regarding selfhost, you are now would like to see solutions and you can find your problems for them. This is not a good approach, this is not how the world should work, in my opinon. First find problems, then find solutions for them.

    So as advice, just start learning webdev and try to host your stuff (even for yourself only as practice). As you do it, you will meet with a lot of problem then, you can finf solutions for your problem. What kind of problems? Few example:

    • At some point you may thing that you want your own repository (git server) to host.
    • Or you don’t want to remember port numbers just use subdomains, you need a proxy.
    • You need databases, how to backup and restore them?
    • Database query seems slow so you want to use some distributed cache?
    • Needs running multiple instances? Need proxy, load balancer, and so on

    But these things are solutions for something that you do not have yet, problems. It is not sure that you need all of the things from list and you probably will need others. So just do something on your machine, you will find your problems, then you can find solutions.