[extr]

I have a similar story (albeit at a much smaller scale). Around 2017 when you could still mine eth-derived altcoins feasibly with a GPU, I repurposed my old gaming PC into a mining rig with a few old cards. I took off the side and taped a box fan to it to provide air-flow [1]. My apartment at the time was $950 flat, all utilities included, zero language about max usage in my lease, so effectively whatever I mined was 100% profit.

I wasn't making much, maybe $50/mo at absolute peak? I'm sure if I had scaled up the property manager would have eventually wondered why/who was spiking the apartment building's electrical bill and I would have found the limit to my unit's "unlimited" electricity. But it was a fun project. I was working a full time job too, so I learned a lot about remote managing something like that. I had it all wired up with a VPN so I could SSH into the mining box from my phone. Here's another pic of my "workstation" at the time. The right hand monitor was my "status dashboard", really just a tmux session with htop, iftop, eth miner, etc... [2].

I was ~25 and single at the time and the biggest obstacle to 100% uptime was actually if I wanted to bring guests or dates over, they would wonder why there was a jet engine in the corner of my studio apt. So I would shut it down in that case. Eventually that + loss of profitability + general jankyness of the setup led me to dismantling it. But it was fun while it lasted. The part in the OP about restarting the box with a screwdriving short definitely spoke to me. My box had a whole ritual around restarts that I discovered through trial and error, where I would power up, pull the plug, restart, restart again, and then it would run stable indefinitely. Good times.

[1] https://i.imgur.com/vTDr7Ap.jpeg

[2] https://i.imgur.com/SUFzTZh.jpg