[somerandomqaguy]

For me, mostly for experimentation with networking. For a practical example: most of my complaints and gripes with IPv6 stem from trying to actually run an IPv6 network. And realizing that folks proclaiming that IPv6 is ready for everyone probably hasn't tried to administer a non-trivial network. Or they're getting enterprise vendor help.

Looks like the author of the story is also dabbling into reliability engineering as well; having hardware can be a little helpful for that too since there's often vendor quirks as well.