If you’ve got two 3.5" bays, you could do a RAID 1 (or a mirror in ZFS terms) with them both. This works very nicely with a small SSD for booting. My TrueNAS server has a 120 GB SSD in the M.2 slot that TrueNAS is installed on, then I have an array of spinning disks that forms the main storage array.

If you are planning any sort of play environment that you might want to keep (like a Pixelfed instance) I’d strongly recommend RAID just for availability in the event of a drive failure. But more than that, backups. They are of number one importance. Before you turn up anything of any importance, figure out a backup strategy.

• What’s a good NAS OS to install?

TrueNAS Scale is the go to. Unraid is another popular option.

• Any fun things I can do besides plex transcoding with a 1080 GPU?

Local LLM. Look up Ollama.

• Would it make sense to run a Pixelfed/Mastodon server off this guy?

You could. That could potentially use a lot of space or be very annoying you having to manage and moderate the instances.

• Can I run a RAID on it without buying a separate HDD bay?

What do you mean? Are you talking about a hardware RAID card, or can you physically stuff more than one disk drive into the chassis? For the first, it’ll depend on whether it has any open PCI Express slots. For the second, what do you see when you open it up? Are there 3.5" or 5.25" bays open?

Other than a Plex port forward, I have zero experience putting services out on the public web (but would like to learn!).

Wanting to learn is an admirable goal. I’ve not done it myself, but the Linux Upskill Challenge might be a good place to start. Either that, or figure out something you might want to host yourself, then come back and ask for input when you run into trouble or have a question.

I just switched from using Medusa and CouchPotato to Sonarr and Radarr. During the library import process, you can specify if the application should “monitor” the media which is what it means to download new content or try and replace with higher qualities. You can import entire libraries as “Unmonitored” so it will show it, but effectively ignore it unless you go back and change it. You can also just not import your library, and start “clean” if you wanted, and I believe it will just ignore the files for anything you don’t add.

If you mainly want to “hide” your IP, you can’t. Look at the headers of any message. It’ll still show the original source IP, which will be yours.

For the rest of the time I’d recommend getting a spam filtering service. Mimecast, ProofPoint, Barracuda, etc.

Messages sent to you go to the filter, which then forwards the message over to your mail server. Outbound you configure your server to use the filter as a smart host. These filters will also buffer messages if your mail server is offline. So if the server is down, the filter holds on to messages and retries delivery later when your server is back up (within reason).

You must have had a real sweetheart deal on VMware then. Proxmox is cheaper than VMware even under the old pricing. You also don’t have to buy the “Standard” subscription. There are cheaper ones.

I’m not aware of any that would run all of it at the same time. Most of this equipment is built for use with a server CPU and motherboard, which obviously has more PCI-E lanes. The Zen 5 consumer CPUs only have 28 PCI-E lanes, so unless you buy a motherboard that breaks out more through the use of a PCI-E switch, that’s all you’ll get.

That’s right. So on the top backplane, you’ll connect the Oculink ports to the Oculink outfitted HBA. One port per drive.

For the bottom 8 drives, it looks like you’ll have one miniSAS HD connector per four drives, plus another for the rear bays. I initially thought they were plain SATA and would go to the motherboard. But it looks like you’ll need a third connector - so you’ll want a 16 port HBA (Supermicro AOC-S3216L-L16iT).

Reading through all the documentation I can, it looks like you’ll have the option to run all the bays as NVME or SAS disks. The controllers and layouts I’ve listed are for running four bays as NVME, and the other 10 as SAS.

If I understand the ports you have - Supermicro AOC-SLG3-4E4T for the U.2 bays and a Supermicro AOC-S3008L-L8e for the SAS bays. You could replace the SAS card with a Dell HBA 330 as well. The Dell PERC cards that support NVME storage don’t appear to have the Oculink ports your backplane has.