A terrible way to jump into colocating your own stuff

I've been wanting to do this for a while: basically, to write a really snarky post about the bare minimum required to run your own hardware in a colocation environment. I'm talking about doing as little as possible, and possibly screwing up bigtime while you're at it.

Based on chats with some of my friends, it seems like this model is not well known. One of them had a situation a while back where everyone was now working from home due to COVID, and so they would all VPN back to the office park where the servers were, including their NAS "box-o-disks". It was obnoxiously slow and laggy and failed a lot, too.

I said he could probably find a spot to colocate that stuff given that he lives in a major metro area, and sure enough, he did. A few weeks later, everything was parked in there, and the resulting boost in connectivity (throughput and availability both) made everyone so much happier.

0. Scrounge up at least an old dumb Ethernet switch (or *gasp* a hub!) and some random-ass hardware that'll run Linux, like a Raspberry Pi, or some old PC box or whatever.

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