Maybe the administration just misunderstood the meaning and the mandate of the White house.

A Swede, a German, and a Brazilian walk into a bar.
“Where’s the Norwegian?” The bartender asks them.
The three guests look at the floor, and begrudgingly reply:
“Still playing football…”

My home servers have generally a lot smaller attack surface, as only a few ports are actually routed to them, so in theoey I could get away with a more relaxed approach. But I’m also a big believer in defense-in-depth, so I follow the same rules of thumb:

• iptables (or equivalent) that drops anything incoming that isn’t wanted. It also rejects anything going out that isn’t planned for.
• any public facing service (except ssh) gets its own user
• disable root login via ssh
• ssh login with key only on any user in sudoers

If I was on my laptop and not my phone I would post a screenshot with a P just for you

Calibrations are important, but the defaults should work reasonably OK out of the box. Don’t expect perfection from the start, aim for “good enough” and improve over time.

• Bed leveling (tramming) is mostly automated these days, since it’s such a vital step
• Extrusion multiplier (a.k.a. flow rate) needs to be done on a per filament basis, but it’ll probably work fine with defaults. Dialing this in is useful, but not super critical in the beginning.
• Pressure advance… eh, no comment, as I haven’t mastered this yet. Suffice to say my petg prints could be better, and this is the likely reason

Beyond that, filaments vary in quality. Try to stick to one brand and type that works well for you and your needs and once you’ve mastered that, try others.

And learn blender (or anything else that can export to .stl or other supported formats). It turns your printer into a proper household tool you wouldn’t be able to live without. My house has so many functional prints that I wouldn’t be able to go back to not being able to print whatever doodad I need.

EDIT: Things you should have:

• Filament dryer. Nothing fancy needed. I have one that can hold two spools at once, so that I can print from one spool while the next spool is drying.
• Calipers are vital for measuring things you want to print.
• Micrometer tool is excellent for dialing in flow rate perfectly.

Well, there’s a footnote on my end: Me taking the drives home is a bit of a grey area, as the procedures say that the drives are to be mechanically destroyed when no longer needed. It doesn’t specify needed by whom. And I do attack them with my angle grinder, so it’s in accordance with company policy.

And yes, my employer knows and is OK with it. We go through a ridiculous amount of drives due to large storage needs, so pragmatism tends to trump bureaucracy.

I usually scavenge old drives from work. On one hand they’re a bit smaller than I’d like them to be, but on the other hand they’re free except from the minor work and documentation involved in ensuring that no company related data remain.