A stick figure with hands at hips and question marks over its head next to a twisting, looping dotted path leading to the words 'THE INTERNET'

The journey begins.

TL;DR - I'm on an adventure to become a part of the internet, starting my own rural ISP + web hosting service in the process.

Some of my favorite projects are the ones where the only truthful answer to the question of "Why?" is "idk it seemed interesting".

This is very much one of those projects.

I think it kinda naturally unfurled as an offshoot of my interest in self-hosting. Buying a used Dell M1000e blade server on Craigslist made me really learn networking (and power consumption, and hearing damage) in a way that my day jobs never had. And then I started asking questions. Dangerous questions, like:

How does the internet actually work?

A series of tubes, yes, yes sure, but like, how?? What actually happens when I send a packet over the network? How does it get from my home to *gestures broadly* The Internet?

This series is not going to attempt to answer that extremely large question. There are far, far better resources on the internet covering different pieces of it, which I'll try to link to when relevant. What this series will do is chronicle my journey, starting with getting an ASN, futilely trying to get IPv4 addresses, putting servers in datacenters, attempting to make friends (read: peers), and leasing + building physical fiber + wireless infrastructure.

I suspect I'm very much nearer the beginning of this quest than the end, which is to say that I have a ton to learn, and I'll try to write about things as they unfold.