Are you fixing that switch? Or setting it up as a Minecraft server?

Cisco shows off how you can brick it on a Catalyst 9300

Cisco has published a guide to running Minecraft on its switches.

Borg developer advocate Florian Pachinger sensibly justified the feat by asking: "Why not host your computer game servers directly on the switch instead of connecting to any dedicated server far away – it's closer locally."

It's actually not much of a trick: several current Cisco boxen can run Docker containers and a Minecraft server is already available on DockerHub. DNA Centre, Cisco's cloudy management plane, can install Docker packages on managed devices. A little networking configuration later and Pachinger was doing whatever it is people do in Minecraft.

He spoiled the trick a little by using a VPN to play from home with Minecraft presumably on an at-work Catalyst 9300 switch.

Left unsaid is that this might not be the best use of VPN resources at this time, especially seeing as Cisco itself was caught without enough capacity to serve its own staff when they all went home in a hurry.

Your humble hack imagines that in normal times it would be rather easier to sell this arrangement by pointing out that we all need some relaxation in the office and Minecraft fits the bill – but not at the expense of WAN capacity! By keeping all the action on the LAN, where bandwidth is free and plentiful and QoS controls are fine-grained, workers can get their low-fi fun without slamming the external network in search of an external server.

Cisco has been baking the ability to run workloads into its networking devices for a while now, and a few can host either VMs or containers. Cisco suggests this as a way to augment those devices with networking-centric workloads, or as a way to deploy apps closer to users. ®