What do you want to practice? Just general sysadmin stuff? Networking? Clustering? Horizontal scaling? All of the above?

Old PCs are just Debian servers waiting to happen. Depending on their specs, you may be able to do VMs or you can utilize container frameworks like Podman, Docker, or LXC to deploy individual applications or application stacks. Or you can just bare metal install anything you want.

Years ago, I bought a batch of 16 Wyse thin clients on eBay for about $15/each. These had 4GB SSDs and 2 GB RAM, so I upgraded about half of them with 64-120GB SSDs (whatever I had lying around) and 8 GB RAM. Thin clients can usually be found pretty inexpensively and are pretty power efficient, but they’re not performant workhorses. They’re great for practicing networking, VLANs, system orchestration (e.g. Ansible, Cockpit) application clustering and horizontal scaling, diskless workstations, setting up a demo office server and workstations, and even VMs if you’re just practicing; they’re a little underpowered to run a lot of VMs, but you can certainly run a few small ones just to practice managing them.

than to carry something like an evaporative cooler

Evaporative coolers don’t really work in high humidity. If you live in an area that’s a dry hot, they work great. Summers in my area, though, are very muggy. Other than ice pack based products, the only passive coolers I’ve found work in humid environments are these sweat bands that have either desiccant beads in them or that stuff that’s in diapers. They pull the sweat away keeping it out of your eyes and give a little evaporative cooling at the same time.

Webapp. It’s the development branch of Tesseract.

I can use regexes, so it makes it a bit shorter list:

I’m probably as environmentally conscious as I am today because of him and Captain Planet. RIP

That’s basically what goes through my head when someone compliments me on my punctuality.

I’d have to look, but I’m going with ignorance of its toxicity like with other things such as radium being used frivolously .

We painted our kids’ rooms with it, painted pencils yellow with it, used it for water lines, put it in gasoline where we then breathed the leaded fumes for decades, and more.

As for finally getting around to replacing lead water lines, well, infrastructure isn’t sexy and no one wants to pay for it.

The toxic material/element lead (Pb). A lot of old water mains and service lines were made out of lead or had lead in them which leaches into the drinking water.

I don’t really understand what’s going on in the above picture, but maybe they’re changing old pipes for new ones?

Possibly replacing old, lead pipes. They’re doing a lot of that in my area because of federal funding from a couple years ago.

509 reviews as I write this and still 0 downloads and zero of those 509 reviews have any text; they just have ratings.

I’m not a fan of crossposting since is clutters up my post history, but feel free to.

While I totally understand those communities, my preference is to not relegate anything that isn’t rage to a special community since it distills regular news down to just the rage. Just my personal preference.

I’m beyond tired of the Tr*mp Rage Show Spectacular, so here’s some uplifting news for y’all.

Speaking from recent experience, the smaller thing can, and often does, turn into a larger thing all on its own and always at the worst time.

For the last 3 years, I knew my water heater was on its last legs. I kept putting it off until two Saturdays ago I had a wet basement and no hot water. The kick in the ass was that it wasn’t that hard to replace the unit: 2 hours of labor to install and 2 hours to drain, remove, and clean around the old one. Cost me just under $650 including same day delivery which was awesome because I would have had to rent a truck and drafted someone to help me load/unload it otherwise.

So my advice is when you allocate time to address the small problem, give yourself double that in case it turns into a bigger project. It’s always easier to deal with big stuff when it’s not a surprise.

You can also POST AS A GUEST TO THE FEDIVERSE without signing up.

Oh, dear lord. As if we don’t have enough spam and drive-by trolls as it is.

Mine died last weekend and I had to replace it. $650 to do myself, and that included same day delivery.

It failed the prior night, noticed it mid-morning, ordered at 2pm, received it at 5, and had it installed by 7. Was kind of a pain but not nearly as awful as I feared.

The number of upvotes on this post (and it’s xpost in c/politics) is extremely disheartening and shows why getting news from social media is doomed to spread crackpot shit. People will like and share anything they agree with no matter what tinfoil rag it links to.

Humanity makes me sad.

My friend got me into it, and it was the first and only MUD I ever really got into. So kind of loved it by default. I tried out a few others but never really got very far beyond the first few levels in each.

Beyond that, it was intuitive as far as MUDs went, had a massive world and lore, and was well “modded”.

https://www.autoweek.com/racing/nascar/a1872056/dale-earnhardt-dale-jr-both-opposed-confederate-flag/

I used to play the crap out of A.V.A.T.A.R. As of a few days ago, it was still alive and active.

avatar.outland.org:3000

You can use telnet or a more capable MUD client. I used to use zMUD back in the day, but it hasn’t been developed since 2008. The last time I sat down and played, I used Mudlet.

I do!

Kubernetes is a nightmare and overkill for most things we need to run, and Docker Swarm is super easy to setup and maintain.

We only use it for one application, though. The app needs to scale horizontally and scale up and down with demand, so I put together a 6 node swarm cluster just for it. Works great, though the auto scaling required some helper scripting.