Trainguyrom

I hate to say it, but I almost appreciate the honesty that comes from multiple different alphabet soup brands selling the exact same item often with the exact same photos. Additionally, unbranded items aren't always poor quality.

I've actually got some unbranded Christmas light strings I bought because I just wanted to put some lights on some columns at my wedding and wanted to spend less than $100 doing so, and those light strings have outlasted every commercial Christmas light string I've purchased. Heck I have a couple of those strings which have been on for 3+ years straight.

Most unbranded items are made by factories that do OEM and ODM work for actual brands that we've all heard of, so they know how to make quality products and they can get more ongoing orders if they make products that are worth restocking. Sometimes you get burned but far more often than not I end up with something that's relatively decent quality and fullfills the need I have for the item

I mean it would be very space efficient to build such a space on some of where the parking lot is. A smallish parking space is 8'x16' so take 3 spaces, assuming each pod needs an exterior space of 4x8, stacked 2 high you can easily fit at least 32 pods in just 3 parking spaces with enough space leftover for hallway and a communal kitchen or something. They already have a public bathroom and shower facility so they'd only need the sleeping space and some communal recreation space that they can keep open 24/7 for their students staying in the pods

Hilariously I thought it was nuns at first glance

Just some good ol Fediverse fun. Don't forget there was also that period of retro meme templates, and everyone was posting like peak circa 2009 memes

I do genuinely wonder if some amount of vaccine skepticism comes from a place of just not wanting to get a shot.

I've never tried the Proxmox over Debian method, I just know it is an officially supported install method. Good on you for getting that far though!

A hale storm earlier this year and the power outage it caused created some bizarre issue with my home server I have yet to diagnose. All of my containers and VMs corrupted in some way, so I had to restore from backup, but my file server container has some sort of permissions issue on top of that.

Honestly the brownout before the outage is almost definitely what did it, but the cost of a UPS that also protects against brownouts is well outside of my usual hobby budget so it's hard to justify on ewaste hardware that I got a pallet of for less than what the UPS would cost used

Realistically, comfort comes from experience. The more you use it the more you'll feel comfortable.

If you want to get a lot of exposure without dedicating too much time to it and limit the risk, I would say, spin up a Debian VM and try to configure it into the server you want the old school way. Setup ssh keys, raid pool and samba share all via ssh. Try to do it like you're actually deploying it. This will give you real world exposure to the command line and the commands you'd run. Next maintain that server like it's production, ssh in every couple of weeks to run updates and reboot. Just that muscle memory of logging in and reviewing updates will help you feel more comfortable. Do it again with another service (a VPN server would be an easy choice, a Minecraft server is also a fun one but requires a lot more memory. DNS would be good if you're feeling brave, but that's really just because DNS architecture is more complex than most realize) and maintain those servers too

Once you've setup a couple of servers and spent a couple of months monitoring and updating them your comfort level should be much higher and you might feel ready to setup some actually home production servers on Debian or the like.

You mentioned running Trunas and wanting to learn Debian and other FLOSS software, the easy button answer is to run Proxmox. Its free and open source with paid enterprise support plans available and has been rapidly improving just in the handful of years I've been running it. Proxmox is really just a modified version of Debian. They have some tweaks and custom kernels over stock Debian but impressively actually have a supported install method of installing overtop of an existing Debian install and apparently some Proxmox employees actually run it as their workstation operating system

With an uptime of greater than 5 years I'm going to be concerned about the system potentially not coming back up after a reboot/power outage, especially for physical hardware

At a bank I worked at, we had an old IBM Power server which was at that point purely used for historical data. It had multiple years of uptime and was of course a good 10+ years old. When we went to take it offline, we actually just disabled the nic on the switch so we could reduce the number of powercycles it would see in fear that it would not power on anymore. Theoretically the data on it is purely historical, backed up and not needed, but there was enough question marks on each of those fronts we just played it safe

I see lots of people suggesting non-work things, but that gets old fast and depending on your work environment can be stressful as you might get caught "not working"

I'd be trying to take on new projects. Start by getting to know your coworkers. If you have other people in your department, talk to them about what they're working on, things they'd like to see done. If you're the lone person in your area of work you could alternatively walk the floor and start talking to anyone who could be the stakeholder for a future project. Learn what their pain points are, where the current practices have blindspots.

You mentioned being a safety admin, I'm guessing that's industrial safety right? Start looking into whatever the current buzzwords are in the industrial safety field and make it a project you take to your boss and try to get funding. Find ways to improve the current processes and data tracking. If you don't already use a fancy incident tracking system outside of Excel, start doing some research and getting some numbers from vendors and have a chat with your boss about how using an actual purpose built database can improve compliance (that's about 70% of my duties right now is managing and configuring my organization's SAAS risk management database, but we also have ~10k workers in the field so it's highlighting useful data points in the data we've already collected primarily)

Unless your position is stuck below a manager with zero flexibility for process improvement, there's always new projects to be discovered and started to improve existing processes

I know there’s already too much content on the Web

No such thing!

I've had good luck sharing my own interests instead. A few years ago I got super into watching SpaceX's rocket launches because it's honestly spectacular and they know how to do a really good livestream, plus watching the booster come back from orbit and softly touchdown is pretty incredible (I've had a hard time enjoying the live streams since Musk's involvement with Trump of course)

But popping over to a coworker and going "hey there's a rocket launch in 2 minutes, wanna take 8 minutes and watch it with me?" is a brilliant ice breaker