[mothered]

Thank you to everyone above for your kind words, It means a lot to me.

It seems like @Skullmeat has you covered, and It's not my Intention to override his advice. If your request has not been fulfilled further down the track, I shall provide my thoughts.

[Nyx]

Thank you to everyone above for your kind words, It means a lot to me.

It seems like @Skullmeat has you covered, and It's not my Intention to override his advice. If your request has not been fulfilled further down the track, I shall provide my thoughts.

Not so much looking for advice more just a general network setup thread. Trying to get an idea of what other people have that I may be interested in getting.

[Skullmeat]

To be honest my setup is overkill. It really depends on what you plan on doing with it.

[Nyx]

To be honest my setup is overkill. It really depends on what you plan on doing with it.

So far thinking first and foremost a Plex server so I can mass torrent movies and store them on there. After that I was thinking of maybe setting up a cloud so I can access files across my network as I wouldn't mind getting away from Google Drive. Email server seems like a cool idea but also maybe overkill. Maybe build a library of books on there but other than that I'm out of ideas of what I'd even really use a server for.

[Skullmeat]

To be honest my setup is overkill. It really depends on what you plan on doing with it.

So far thinking first and foremost a Plex server so I can mass torrent movies and store them on there. After that I was thinking of maybe setting up a cloud so I can access files across my network as I wouldn't mind getting away from Google Drive. Email server seems like a cool idea but also maybe overkill. Maybe build a library of books on there but other than that I'm out of ideas of what I'd even really use a server for.

Well, plex needs bandwidth. So if you want to do that, wifi wont cut it, and most consumer routers aren't up to snuff. I recommend something with gigabit lan throughput. There's two routes you can go with this, either a consumer router with custom firmware (I really like advanced tomato), or an enterprise router, which will be complex to setup, but can easily handle high amounts of traffic. As fors a server, your biggest concerns are going to be storage, so RAID is definitely something you want to look at. If you plan to running multiple services, a Dell PowerEdge like mine isn't terribly expensive used, and you get the benefit of VMWare ESXi and Dell iDRAC. However if space is a concern, you are better off using a desktop, because rack servers like mine are BIG.

[Skullmeat]

I need to cable manage it, but haven't due to the downtime that would require, but here's my setup.



Cisco 2911 Integrated Services Router
https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/r...index.html

Cisco 2960-24TT-L 10/100 Dual Gigabit Port Managed Switch
https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/support/sw...model.html

Dell PowerEdge R710 Virtualization Server
(x2) Intel Xenon 5645 @2.4 Ghz
32 GB Ram
(x2) 250GB Dell 10k RPM SAS Drives
Generic 750GB HDD
VMware ESXi 6.5
Dell iDRAC 6 Enterprise (Integrated Dell Remote Access Controller)

Wow I really like this setup. This is the kind of setup I had in mind. If you don't mind me asking, what do you run/store on your server? (other than your obligatory 10tb porn collection lol)

I run a website, (no, its not a forum) several game servers, and an internet radio. I also run VMs for whatever project I'm currently working on. Right now I'm messing around with Asterisk, and plan to learn more about AD DS (Active Directory Domain Services) in the future.

[Skullmeat]

Finally got around to getting a proper network rack. So much nicer.

Spoiler: