SuperUserDO

It depends on your goal. If it’s to learn (to say get a different job) you want/need as much flexibility as you can get. If it’s just to have a media server then you probably want to optimize in favor of that.

Think of this like any specialty skill. It’s hard the first time but will quickly become second nature. But first you have some homework…

If you have a way to section off your network and understand how to expose service’s to the web you are off to a great start from the networking side.

For the ssl cert. As others have mentioned it’s time to go read up on how DNS works. You don’t need to go super technical (yet, if ever) - but getting you head around DNS delegation and registers will answer all the questions you have here. The super TLDR is you “buy” a domain and tell your register where they can tell others to find the records for that domain. Once you can prove you own the domain you can get certs. There are a bunch of options going this path, I’m most familiar with the enterprise grade choices (aka super expensive) so am not the best to recommend something for someone starting out.

Now for VMs. I’m sorry to say it’s homework time. You have three primary choices: everything in a full VM, everything in containers or a mix. If your interested in having a GUI (learn the cli when your comfortable) then I’m going to recommend you look at two different technologies: proxmox (it’s overkill but might be what you want) or virt-manager.

Let’s be frank. The boss probably does not even know what a log is, let alone that people can pull it.

One of the more important lessons learned from a career in and around IT: no one holds a grudge like senior, non manager IT staff. And they turn up in the strangest meetings/locations. Hence the warning of “be careful”.

Be careful. IT with good CYA has logs. If they are really good at CYA, the logs have logs. They might be a terrible IT, but they might be good at CYA (or friends with security, who makes good IT CYA look like chump change).

Cobol. We have experienced this problem happening organically with Cobol developers. The worlds financial infrastructure runs on Cobol and anyone who had skills in this language can pick the company they want to work at.

So let’s talk about the Anthropic models, cause that’s what I’m playing with on the company dime.

Wire up a few mcp configs (don’t even start me on the inherent risks associated with current MCP permissions model…) and give it a run book and it’s great at generating reports for me about stuff I kinda care about.

Could if replace an entry level grad? Sure. Will that company have all kinds of strange problems - hell yes. Think of it as an intern. You can give it all the crappy intern tasks while you make coffee. Only the intern improves when you give feedback…