one man's e-waste is another man's infra backbone

rapidly approaching the second quarter of the 21st century, the growth of the computer manufacturing industry is at an all-time-high. so much shit gets made, and even more shit gets thrown out after the new next best thing comes out on the market. but the thing is - the shit in question is still very much useful to a person with a know-how. if you consider yourself tech-savvy and don't have any kind of a homelab yet - fuck you, build one immediately. literally everything in the current economical situation is stacked in favor of it - hardware that is still potent to work with current technology is getting cheaper and cheaper, and the supply is growing by the day. but lemme elaborate on that a little more so it doesn't look like a rant but an actually useful manual.

used enterprise hardware - the magnum opus

companies and enterprises in general of all sorts decommission used/end-of-warranty hardware every day, often selling it for cheap to get rid of the paperwork attached to the process faster and recuperate their expenditures as fast as possible. this results in an influx of new hardware available on the aftermarket and marketplaces, usually once every quarter, in some cases every month or so. but what does this mean for someone like you and me? one thing only - freebies. well, not exactly freebies, since you'll likely still pay for the stuff, but it's gonna be a fraction of its actual worth in money. you can find used managed switches with 10/25G SFP+ ports and rack servers for a price that would be considered hilarious. that's especially true for the 1st/2nd world countries, where most of the industry is now centered in IT sector. literally thousands of pieces of equipment are being sold for what is considered dirt cheap by the enterprises, and hence are within a regular person's budget(depending on your income, of course). show by example - i bought my dell poweredge R730 for about 300$ total with 2x intel xeon E5-2680v4 CPUs, 192GB ECC DDR4, X520-based 10G dual-port SFP+ NIC, 4 5TB drives, with RAID controller included. for that amount of computing power - it's next to nothing. it's cheaper than any current-day PC build, unless you go for an office shitter, that is. and your opportunities self-hosting using your new infrastructure become practically limitless. it's your hardware, it will never be taken from you because you "violated terms of service" or some shit, all your data is secure and can be destroyed with a swing of a hammer, if needed. it's true freedom, but as you have probably figured by now, nothing is free in this world.

SIKE!(or how to get shit for free)

well, there are some things that you can get without spending any money, but that is mostly an opportunistic endeavor and requires you to be extra perceptive and paying attention to your surroundings. the potential yield of you yanking what isn't nailed to the floor depends on your location, current occupation and pure luck. but since this is intended to be more of a guide, let me provide you with some examples of what you can, should and shouldn't grab:

• unused network physical media(copper/fiber patches, SFP modules) - a must, a daily gather for many. obviously, don't yank an active link, but if you see it lying down and collecting dust for several days or even weeks - don't hesitate and grab that bitch.
• unused network hardware(old switches/routers) - a great prize, though would be a lot more obvious when it disappears. account for many things, like "is it replaceable? is it gonna be used soon? how long has it been here?" and so on. if the answer is "nobody fucking cares" - yank it.
• unused SBCs/microcontrollers(RPi, STM32/ESP32 type) - not that common to find, but extremely easy to yank. they are also cheap as shit, so if one disappears - they will just order a new one. but as always, make sure nobody gives a shit about it and that it's existence is completely forgotten.
• decommissioned hardware up for recycling - the absolute baller in terms of yield, and has zero consequences of getting yanked. sometimes, you can straight up ask the guy who's in charge of the recycling/decommissioning process whether you can take it for yourself, and unless it's data storage, the answer is usually yes. requires connections, employment at such facility or adjacency to one, or the know-how - but it's probably the best overall way to get free hardware.
• broken/malfunctioning hardware about to be thrown away - hit or miss, really. if you know how to repair it or make use of it any other way - by all means. if not - still get it and use it for spare parts if they can be reused. otherwise - STILL grab it as a decoration, put it on your shelf or some shit idk.

a note on physical storage media

proceed with caution. have an airgapped machine to wipe shit clean without letting it to connect to anything. use thorough formatting, not the fast bullshit that some may use. change the partition table several times to fuck up any traces of partitions ever present, then format the thing again and again. some hard drives and SSDs have the secure erase functionality, use it.

but why even do all this?

if you have enough hardware to run all the necessary digital infrastructure you use in your daily life(all kinds of services, underlying network infra, media storage, etc) - you can be free of the shackles of the megacorps and IT giants who sell out your data like a cheap whore to the highest bidder. all your data will be as safe as you are, not relying on external provider to supposedly "keep your data secure with military-grade standards". you can be at peace knowing that if anything like a data leak would happen to the IT giants or the government, your data present there would be minimal or non-existent.

this is about digital sovereignty and becoming ungovernable, and that requires you to own your fucking hardware.