I use an HP microserver gen 8, which I bought second hand (300$) and upgraded with a better CPU (20$ from ebay) and extra ram (80$) and 4 2TB SSD’s (100$ per). I installed Windows server on it because I just wanted it to work in a way I’m familiar with, but a colleague of mine installed Synology OS on it. You can use the cd drive bay for the OS disk (with some tweaking). Since you already have the disks, this would fit your budget.
Ah, that hits close to home. I have spent a lot of time and energy to get my direct bosses onboard with following best practices and doing things right from the start. To their credit, they got onboard with it and are pushing that message themselves now. Of course, the board doesn’t care about that and just jams random projects with strict deadlines without any thoughts given to the IT aspects of it up our asses, but our head of IT has apparently grown a spine and started pushing back, with some moderate success.
The MO of my company has for years been: do a POC and then as soon as it works, push that POC in production. I’m still cleaning up the mess of idiotic shit like that from 15 years ago.
This is way too accurate. With a buddy I even have what our wifes call playdates, where we are messing around with proxmox, containers and linux distros. We both have some old poweredge servers, laptops, raspberry pies and old phones to mess around with. Nothing useful has come out of that so far, although we’re preparing a lemmy and mastodon instance, so we’re getting there.
I don’t know anyone that has comptia a+, but it looks like a decent intro. It does strike me as something they would teach you at almost any helpdesk type position. But after skimming the contents, I like their focus on troubleshooting, which is an essential skill that can (has to) be learned.
If you want to know more about certain subjects, there are a ton of resources online available. Microsofts learning site offers learning material on almost anything MS related, for example.
That would be weirdly secure