“No” is a complete sentence, and colleagues aren’t necessarily friends. If it’s not paid, it’s your time to do with as you please.

Just say no thanks or say you’ve got other things you need to do.

You didn’t mention your budget. That will impact things.

If you have a closet with a rack you have a lot of options, hardware-wise. If you’ll be running this in your living room, for sake of your sanity, something like an AMD mini-PC with a small NAS for additional hosted storage via NFS would probably be your best bet.

A PC with Proxmox could do this handily. I have a cheap Ryzen 5500u mini PC hosting my Plex server, audiobookshelf, home assistant, and DLNA server (AssetUPnP). It’s only 6 core/12 thread and32GB RAM but still has resources to spare. You could totally do an 8c/16t one and throw more RAM at it.

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Edit - oh, and don’t forget that if you’re going to be hosting a public instance, you’ll need a good internet connection (with good up and down speed, generally fiber is good for that) and a public IP.

This is freaking awesome. Only a few years ago it was exciting to see a fusion reaction last a fraction of a second.