how do I make this thing useful?

I'm sorry to say I've gotten pretty darned frustrated with this very expensive boat anchor on my desk.  I can't for the life of me figure out how to get my computer to know it's there.  I can get to the web gui in my internet browser but how do you actually put files onto the server.  It shows as tower in windows explorer but cannot access it.  Diagnosis is useless.  Can anyone help?  Please?

Make sure your server is connected to the ethernet and your computer, too. After booting up, the web interface of the server should be available if you just type http://tower in the adressbar of your web browser (on your computer). You can additionally check your router if it is set to  give IP adresses automatically (DHCP) or alternatively set your own  ip configuration on the flashdrive in /config/network.cfg like this:

# Generated settings:
USE_DHCP="no"
IPADDR="192.168.178.39"
NETMASK="255.255.255.0"
GATEWAY="192.168.178.1"
DHCP_KEEPRESOLV="no"
DNS_SERVER1="192.168.178.1"

I hope this helps.. You are not giving much info on what you tried so this is about it

edit: If you have a screen and keyboard connected to the server you can log into the commandline by typing 'root' after it booted and see the ip of the device by typing 'ifconfig'.

Without further information as to what exactly your problems are, your steps should be (assuming you have set up your hard drives)

Create users on your server through the User's tab.  The user names and passwords should match your login credential on your desktop.

Create shares on your server through the Shares tab (ie: Movies, Television, Pictures, etc) and set the appropriate permissions for them.

After tha you should be able to open up an explorer window and navigate to the share (\\tower\Movies) for instance and copy the files onto them.

Make sure server and PC are on the same workgroup. If the PC is a Windows machine the the server should show up as Tower under Network, assuming you haven't changed the default name. You should at least see the flash share and possibly other share, if you did setup user shares in unraid.

Make sure your server is connected to the ethernet and your computer, too.

If you'd read his post, you'd see he can get to the web interface just fine.

OP, you need to set up a user (typically just use whatever user you're using on your Windows box), and then set up a share.  Once you've done that you're laughing.

No one has said it yet, but make sure you turn SMB on under the settings. Otherwise your windows machine won't be able to find your Unraid Server.

Also suggest adding users and shares, and configuring SMB settings on those shares.

As you can see, there are many other users willing to help!  We haven't heard from you, and don't have much to go on, but please review the guidelines for getting help.  If you can tell us more about your system and the problem, perhaps someone will have the answer.

A moderator will probably move this soon to the General Support board.

Hmm, registered and stayed on the board for about 15 minutes and then hasn't come back. I'm betting none of these posts are helping the OP.

I'm sorry to say I've gotten pretty darned frustrated with this very expensive boat anchor on my desk.  I can't for the life of me figure out how to get my computer to know it's there.  I can get to the web gui in my internet browser but how do you actually put files onto the server.  It shows as tower in windows explorer but cannot access it.  Diagnosis is useless.  Can anyone help?  Please?

Perhaps this will help:

https://lime-technology.com/wiki/index.php/UnRAID_Manual