I have heard that there is a modification you can do to put a resistor into the fan to lower the speed of the fan and quiet the server down. But I don’t know if that works on your specific brand and you would need to research the specifics yourself before making a hardware modification to a server you’re not 100% comfortable with accidentally destroying.

Well, there’s nothing wrong with that at all. The only thing I was thinking is that you would then also have the rest of the Proxmox server to do other server things with.

For instance, you could set up an LDAP server and create a centralized login for your home domain And have that separate from your portainer setup so that if you make a mistake you don’t end up having to redo your portainer setup.

You could also use it as a VM host to try out different flavors of Linux and see if any of them make any more sense to you.

Even though it’s not recommended, you could also host Truenas on top of Proxmox.

There are good reasons to use virtual machines separate from another virtual machine.

Like the other people said, use Proxmox. Just download the installer, flash it to a flash drive with Rufus and install it and then put it somewhere far away where the noise won’t bother you hopefully plug it into your network and then you can just run it.

One thing that I like to do is to install ubuntu server and then install Docker and Portainer on the server and then you can just run a whole bunch of Docker containers and have a lot of fun playing around with that.

There are a lot of guides for how to do that, but if you set up Proxmox first and then create a VM with, say, four CPUs and four gigs of RAM and 40 gigs of storage space, you’ll have more than enough room in that one virtual machine to run dozens of net services.

Some good ones to install are pihole or ad guard home and nginx reverse proxy.

You can go to DuckDNS and create a subdomain and then set the IP address to your internal ip.

Once you have that up, you can then go to Let’s encrypt and create a wildcard certificate and then give all of the services you’re running on Docker and on your NAS server an internal name with an SSL certificate instead of having to type in the IP addresses.

The sky is the limit and the more things that you play around with and try, the better you’ll get at them and the more things you’ll learn how to do.

This is also a nice, healthy reminder to never purchase from scalpers.