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I will be happy to help you, with the limited knowledge I have obtained through this experience :)

Thank you both for the offer! I'm curious about what hardware I would need?

Looks like @seattlea has answered that already. :) Hardware is cheap (compared to your wanderlust) ;)

Air travel definitely isn't cheap anymore!

Feel free to contact me as well, I can help you set it up on pretty much any computer ;)

Thank you! This is great to know. Can you recommend a good computer for this?

It depends what you want to do. If you want just a witness you can run it of a decent laptop, but if you want an API Node then you should have a good machine as you will need at least 4TB of NVMe storage and 64 GB of RAM.

For basic Hive Witness all you need is this:

32 GB RAM
500 GB NVMe (SSD) storage

These are my recommended specs, but you really need only 4-8 GB RAM and 40 GB free disk space to run a witness...
Oh and ideally you are running on Ubuntu Linux and not on Windows / Docker...

To read more check out this excellent post by Marky:
https://hive.blog/witness/@themarkymark/setup-a-hive-witness-using-the-new-rolling-block-log-feature-jte

This is the guide I followed, wouldn't be here without it :)

Thank you! I really appreciate the info!

You are welcome :) The biggest issue is getting a compatible snapshot of the latest version if you want to run .11 version...
I might just create one from my Witness Node :)