Our managed hosting provider wouldn't let us use VPNs or anything that allowed direct access to the managed network they provided, but we wanted to make internal only services that were not on the internet so I setup a simple little system that used DNS to point to private space in the office and a SSH tunnel to forward the ports to the right places. Worked great, but over time the internal stuff grew up, and our IT team refused to let me have a server in the office so it was all running of a pair of mac mini's. We called them the "load bearing mac minis" since basically 90% of the production management traffic went over the SSH tunnels they hosted. =)
Reading that I wonder how much mac minis are used by actual user vs used headless in offices for various purpose.
There is one such mac mini in my office (named "buildbot", because that was its original purpose) that is heavily used by all the dev team (thankfully not connected in anyway to production, apart from simple uptime monitoring).
Obviously, like any other I'm interested in those funny stories you have.