This is what I do, but with alma instead of debian.

Proxmox can run containers directly, but I haven’t tried it yet.

What exactly is not working? What is it doing/not doing, compared to what you are expecting it to do?

Tell him to come back and finish the job, because that is shit, and you’re paying him to do the whole job, not half-ass it.

Or just start a new login shell.

See if there’s a cooling profile option in the BIOS. Maybe also run the Dell diagnostics. Might be something wrong with the fan tachometer.

Worst case, assuming the PWM is working properly, you could use a third-party application to control the fan speed.

As long as the laptop doesn’t go to sleep, yes.

I don’t think OP has backups.

Having one, the other, or both depends on how sure you need to be about recovery, and whether you care about it being available until recovery.

Definitely upgrade the RAM. Also get at least two drives in RAID or ZFS or something so you can tolerate a failure. And keep backups too, if you can’t afford to lose data.

Just ping it?

Actual traffic might be slightly different, but honestly on a LAN you shouldn’t need to worry about latency. But you’re not going to be able to run iperf3 on that router in any case.

Use the -arr tools for organizing/renaming/tagging, and Plex or Jellyfin for playing. You don’t need to connect them to any downloader.

Huh. Kind of surprised it supports up to four drives, but if that’s what it says, there you go. Shouldn’t be any risk of drawing too much current through the wire. At most the board or PSU would shut down.

Also, if you are putting more drives in, see if the BIOS lets you enable staggered spin-up, so that they aren’t all peaking at the same time.

If that’s the stock part, seems like it would be within spec. You can check the manual or detailed spec doc to be sure.

turn on the shower before you use the toilet

It’s not actually about the toilet, it’s about turning on the shower earlier.

What part? Most houses I’ve seen in the Northeast either have some kind of access panel, or the shower is backed by a closet in another room where you could cut in if you needed to.

You’ll have to relocate the heater closer to the shower. You can have someone run the gas line to the new location. That’s about all you can do.

You could insulate the hot water pipe, but that will only help when the water in the pipe is already hot, like if someone showered earlier. It only extends the time the water already in the pipe remains hot.

With a tankless heater, there’s nothing to warm up. Hot water is basically instant when it comes out.

How far is your shower from the heater? Usually, long times to first heat are because you have to go through all the cold water sitting in the line before the hot water reaches you.

Reconsider how much of that 8tb really needs to be backed up. Thousands of pictures of your cat aren’t really going to be missed, and your Linux ISOs can be redownloaded.

I have never known RPM of a drive to affect its noise level. The fan(s) will be far more significant in noise level. Most drives run pretty quietly, though some can get noisy during I/O, like my HGST Ultrastar He6 drives.

Also, without knowing the model, I wouldn’t say they’re not made to run 24/7. But even on desktop drives, it’s rarely run time that kills them, it’s start-stop cycles. Everything will be fine, but one day you’ll shut it down and some drives won’t spin up. That’s why power outages can be deadly to an old server.

A more modern processor probably has better power efficiency. But this one should support features like turning off some of the cores or throttling down when not needed.

You could also see if you can get one with lower power consumption, like even the 6700T.

Right, a bit flip in ZFS cache shouldn’t cause that. But a bit flip in active memory could.