You heard about the American dream. But have you heard of the American Albtraum?

There were no good guys in this. The are both billionaire assholes. Just slightly less shit is still shit.

Who’s gonna steal a loaded 90 disk enclosure xD

So your saying you are dumb. Gotcha

What you describe is a workstation under someone’s desk. Usually when you connect to your campus vpn you should be on the network and be able to reach most things.

The problem is who is gonna manage it when you are gone? I’ve had teams come and ask to get their trash can Mac’s rescued because whoever managed them left the team. How are you going to do backups? Are you gonna put a NAS next to it? Or actually use the tape drives that ITS can provide?

Ask your local research computing group what this team needs to do to host or contribute an actual server. A Mac mini is a consumer product, research grants can I include hardware, your computing group has actual racks and people who know how to manage it.