7 ms·

In addition to that, I don't think people should overthink the rack as an essential component. I like racks as much as the next guy and homelab racks look reall

by cybrox 3y ago

In addition to that, I don't think people should overthink the rack as an essential component. I like racks as much as the next guy and homelab racks look really cool but for usability and learning, just go with whatever you like. I personally have 4 boxes stacked in a corner that are connected to a "rack", which is just two rack side panels bolted to the back of a workbench that I screw components into, connected to NAS and multiple Raspberry Pi's on a shelf and I really like the mess and have learned a lot. Just use what you have and expand as you need. Racks are cool once you're into the hobby enough to care about style points.

NelsonMinar 3y ago
From what I've seen on reddit's /r/homelab, the neat thing about racked systems is you can buy very cheap used hardware that are discards from enterprise uses. There's very little market for an old server or rackmount network switch so you can get very good bargains. Personally I buy new cheap mini PCs and consumer networking stuff. That's another way to get bargains, since consumer hardware is so cheap. But I'm a bit jealous of the enterprise capabilities like proper managed switches or remote managed servers.
- mech422 3y ago
  The down side to the old enterprise servers is the power draw. I had 2 Dell blade server chassis and 1 HP blade server chassis that used Xeon based blades. The electric bill was UNREAL with 10+ blades running at once. I do use Dell PowerConnect manged switches from EBay, but tbh for what I do, TP Link switches work really well and are cheap. They support VLANs, MAC Lans, SNMP, SSH/Web configuration, etc etc - basically fully managed switches. And they have been rock solid as 'edge' switches for each room in the house. The powerconnects basically work as top-of-rack switches for pulling all the different rooms/rack into 1 feed to the cable modem.
  - blackfawn 3y ago
    Agreed. Power draw and often noise on enterprise equipment is ridiculous in a home setting. I try to stick to the small form factor (SFF) or ultra-small form factor (USFF) computers whenever I can, which is what the author is using. I used to use Raspberry Pi boards for some things but always ran into problems w/ microSD cards dying, even with log2ram and buying industrial cards. I haven't had a single issue after switching to tiny x64 machines w/ real SSDs in them. I picked up a HP managed switch that I thought I might use but it draws more power than the ThinkCentre M93p Tiny computers do and it's actively cooled w/ super noisy 1U fan(s) so I'm going to ditch it.
    - nvy 3y ago
      Which x64 machines have you been using? I'm looking for a successor to PC Engines APUs
      - blackfawn 3y ago
        I've been sticking w/ very compact units, mainly ThinkCentre M series "Tiny" and Dell OptiPlex "Micro" form factor, which are both practically identical in size. Both use a laptop power supply. You can get current versions for many hundreds of dollars or generation(s) old ones for as cheap as $30 USD. My most recent ones were older 3rd & 4th gen i5 & i7 CPUs but they still blow current Raspberry Pi, etc. out of the water, have M.2 for network, etc. & SATA for storage. A Dell I have that's a generation newer than these adds NVMe too. It's hard finding these small PCs that have multiple Ethernet but I just added a gigabit Ethernet M.2 card to the one.
      - vially 3y ago
        I was also looking for a successor to the PC Engines APUs and came across https://teklager.se/en/ https://teklager.se/en/ that lists some possible alternatives that you might find interesting. Personally I was looking to build a router so I ended up buying a fanless N100 based mini PC from Aliexpress (e.g.: search term is "N100 firewall appliance") and have been very satisfied with it so far (Proxmox homelab with OPNsense running as a VM).
      - mech422 3y ago
  - EvanAnderson 3y ago
    > The down side to the old enterprise servers is the power draw. It depends on the generation of the gear. Stuff coming off-lease in the last 3 - 4 years has been of a generation where lower power draw became a major selling point. In Dell land, for example, the power draw differences are dramatic between the Rx10, Rx20, and newer series. (Basically, throw Rx10 servers in the trash. Rx20 servers are better but still not great.)
  - buybackoff 3y ago
    Power draw also comes with terrible noise. They were designed to be in a server room, not a living/bed room.
- doublepg23 3y ago
  I feel like it’s a harder sell than it used to be because post-Ryzen there’s been real increases in CPU performance. Modern NUCs and prebuilt also having native NVMe is a boon too. All depends on what you’re going for though.
- internet101010 3y ago
  The caveat to this is noise. People who have never seen a rack server in person don't understand how loud they really are. PSUs, case fans, cpu fans (if applicable) all gotta go. You kind of have to go into it knowing you are going to spend an additional $100-200 replacing it all, and that's assuming you will not have to 3D print a custom bracket to house the new fans.
  - freedomben 3y ago
    Yep, the noise is serious. I may not even seem that bad at first, but if you are going to hear it prolonged, it starts to get really unbearable after a 20 minutes of it. I don't know anybody who isn't irritable after a couple hours. And the heat is enough to make a room very uncomfortable. I started my home lab in my office, and it didn't take long to realize that was not an option. Luckily I was able to find a nook under the stairs where I could stash it, but the heat and noise are polar opposite of a productive office environment.
- bayindirh 3y ago
  What homelab people who do not work with/in a data center daily doesn't realize is how noisy and power hungry is the equipment they procure. They got a managed switch, nice. It has VLANs, stacking, etc. nice. How many 48 port switches you can possibly stack in a home? You got a Sun ZFS7420. Great. That's a rack with two controllers with 1TB RAM each. That thing screams. An entry level 7320 is maybe workable, but you can't do 7420 at home. Same for HPE/Dell/Netapp storage boxen. Doing Infiniband is home is another thing I can't understand. Fiber cables are extremely expensive. Copper is range limited and thick, plus unless you do HPC, its latency and speed doesn't mean much. Go fiber Ethernet. Much more practical. I understand the curiosity and willingness to play, but it's not that practical to play with these at home (noise, space, heat, power wise). I also buy high end consumer hardware. TP-Link has 4/8 port smart managed SOHO switches for example, they even have PoE. Power your Raspi cluster via PoE with less cables and get some respectable computing power with no noise. Neat! No? Dell's Rack servers are generally not noisy at idle, but a 2U server under some real load is unbearable. What's funny that an Intel N95 has the same power with an i7-3770K with better SIMD support while being 4x more efficient, and that thing is not slow by any means.
  - isopede 3y ago
    I don't think fiber cables are expensive. I ran CAT6 in my house and at the same time pulled an OS2 single-mode 30m fiber cable to my office for core switching. The 30m fiber cable was $17 on Amazon, plus two 10G-LR modules at $18 each. The equivalent CAT6 is more power hungry, has less range, the cable is the same damn price, and the 10GBase-T SFP->RJ45 transceivers are twice the price of the LR transceivers at $50 each.
    - bayindirh 3y ago
      Infiniband uses its own cables with dedicated/integrated transceivers. It's not compatible with Ethernet and can't be swapped (unless you plan to talk plain Ethernet with your IB card, which is possible). A 5m, 200gbps cable is $1,149.00 a pop [0]. Mind you, this is neither the longest, nor the fastest cable. [0]: https://esaitech.com/products/mellanoxmfs1s00-h005v-200gbps-infiniband-qsfp56-active-optical-cable https://esaitech.com/products/mellanoxmfs1s00-h005v-200gbps-... More cables: https://esaitech.com/search?type=product&options%5Bprefix%5D=last&options%5Bunavailable_products%5D=last&q=product_type%3ACable+AND+Mellanox https://esaitech.com/search?type=product&options%5Bprefix%5D...
- yummypaint 3y ago
  I haven't seen any mention of going to scrap yards in this thread, but just about every general-purpose yard ive been in has had racks of some kind. Hard to beat scrap price as racks themselves tend to be light when empty.
geek_at 3y ago
I did just the same. Built myself a little movable 6 node rack out of wood. With 3d printed powerbrick holders on the sides and a switch with a 10g uplink so all servers can use the full 1g nic. Warms my home office in the colder months and can be put in the garage on the warmer months. Photo front: https://pictshare.net/qi7zv2.png https://pictshare.net/qi7zv2.png Photo back: https://pictshare.net/llloiw.png https://pictshare.net/llloiw.png Photo of the 3d printed power brick holders: https://pictshare.net/kgffy6.png https://pictshare.net/kgffy6.png [edit] Specs: - 80 Watts during normal load - 50 cores - 9TB nvme storage - 300GB RAM - 3 of them are running proxmox - 3 of them Docker swarm
- E39M5S62 3y ago
  I can't quite see which Thinkcentre's those are, but the M920x can fit a 10GbE PCIe NIC in it and provide it enough power. I have one on my desk with 2x2TB NVMe, 32GB RAM and a 10GbE fiber connection to it.
idatum 3y ago
In the spirit of "your setup, should be your setup. As traditional or as custom as you’d like!" as mentioned in article, I went with a vertical mount rack. It's not enclosed so it has enough ventilation. The advantage with a vertical rack for me was space savings. Key parts of my home lab are near the low voltage panel (lucky to have in newer house) which does have foot traffic from other household members. Much less risk of someone bumping into the rack.
mech422 3y ago
When I started using SBC's for my home setup, I skipped rPi's. At the time, being ARM based was a bit limiting (IIRC, at the time some stuff still hadn't been ported to ARM). So I went with odroid h2/h3 [0]. X86 based, lots of memory to work with, and much cheaper then a nuc - and uses much less power then my old Dell/HP blade servers from EBay :-) 0) https://ameridroid.com/products/odroid-h3 https://ameridroid.com/products/odroid-h3
nextos 3y ago
Also there are great fanless cases for NUCs and RPis. Actually, Asus has taken over NUCs from Intel and they are releasing fanless machines, so now there is not even the need to mod them.
nucleardog 3y ago
Racks are nice from an organization perspective as well, but agreed it’s an unnecessary complication and expense and limits your options. I run a half dozen Lenovo ThinkCentre tiny PCs I picked up off eBay super cheap. Sure, I could go buy some rack mounts for them all… to the tune of $750. It would look really nice. That’s about it. If I’d decided that was a “requirement” I never would have done any of this. For anyone considering diving in to any of this stuff, don’t let the pursuit of “perfect” stop you before you’ve even started. My PCs are quite content sitting in a pile with some scraps of wood shoved between to help with airflow.
noobermin 3y ago
This is because like many things this is a rich man's hobby. See mechanical keyboards for example.
- CharlesW 3y ago
  There's always the $70 IKEA Lack Rack: https://www.instructables.com/The-$70-IKEA-Mini-Server-Rack/ https://www.instructables.com/The-$70-IKEA-Mini-Server-Rack/
  - noobermin 3y ago
    Most of the things on r/homelab and elsewhere are not wooden racks. Most are expensive server racks retrofitted to be vanity projects to serve videos to at most 2 people in a home. It's fine, it's just that people should be honest about what these are.
    - Fnoord 3y ago
      Interesting you mention 2 people. I got kids. So I got a lot of toys in the living room. The small office I got, does contain a printer, a PC, a space for my laptop plus dock, a server, a switch, and a small cluster. But what I don't have is more space. I don't have space for a rack. Furthermore I've been replacing industrial grade fans (in switches, desktop, the cluster and the like) which make a lot of noise (and cool very well) with Noctua which are expensive and have less CFM but are silent enough.
- BadHumans 3y ago
  You can get into custom mechanical keyboards for under 50 dollars. I don't think you understand what you are talking about.
  - bowsamic 3y ago
    Don’t be disingenuous he’s obviously not referring to that part of the mechanical keyboard community
Semaphor 3y ago
In my experience, homelab means high powered or at least a lot of compute. People like me who have tiny, power saving devices are in the selfhosted communities. There's no definition like that, but it happens to turn out that way.
- didntcheck 3y ago
  You can add "data hoarder" to the Venn diagram too!
  - Semaphor 3y ago
    Fair enough, kinda works with neither group. Usually not enough compute for homelab, but care way too much about storage for selfhosted stuff.
atomicnumber3 3y ago
I am honestly kind of anti-rack at this point. "Deals" on used enterprise are IME dreadful unless you can get in on your own employer offloading old stuff, which requires you to a) even have an onprem setup at all and b) be friendly enough with the IT/NOC people that they give you a tip when it's going to happen. (For me b seems to happen naturally so it's really all on a). eBay is a fools game, terrible prices. Craigslist is usually the same sellers too. Maybe some people live behind an Amazon datacenter or something, I unfortunately live in a city where the only reason we have Amazon 2-day shipping is because we're a major shipping hub. And anything that does resemble a good deal is ancient Opterons that are literally e-waste these days. So anyway, sorry, my whole point here is that most people are actually going to be running a ton of old enterprise stuff that is actually rackmountable with good sliding rails. You're either building whiteboxes in a 4U rosewill case or you're putting stuff on rack-mountable shelves. The rosewill cases theoretically have sliding rails but they're awful, just awful. So you're either using shelf rails or literal shelves which tends to throw off efficient utilization of the U's available in the rack - shelf rails usually result in a dead U either above or below them, and shelves obviously have similar effects. So yeah. As someone who owns a rack (4-post open rack), if you asked me, I'd say just go buy one of those big heavy duty Lowe's shelf units and ask for extra shelf inserts so you can have more, but less-tall shelves. Boom, you now have something that'll hold anything and is way better than fucking around with rack nuts and shelf rails and stuff. Love homelabs in general, though.
- sophacles 3y ago
  10-15 years ago the deals were real. I picked up a lot of off-lease and/or used stuff on ebay really cheap. As more and more companies move to cloud, and as more people get into homelabs, prices on decent gear have gone up. I was starting to think the good times were over in 2018 and in 2020 I stopped defaulting to ebay when I saw a great lot getting broken up and sold cheap suddenly pull all their stuff and relist it at much higher prices - "the scrappers are on to us" is what I realized. These days I've been replacing the guts of my old servers with mini-itx setups for the most part. It does what I need and lets me shove 2 or 3 nodes into a 2u case so I can keep the aesthetic of "a personal rack".
- mindslight 3y ago
OJFord 3y ago
Or as a compromise, you can buy strips of appropriately spaced/sized square-punched metal angle; before I moved I built a shelf unit designed so that the depth of the shelf was correct (19" between posts plus a bit for the sheet metal thickness) for a rack, I had access to the side so I had a combination shelf & rack. People do similarly with Ikea tables ('lack rack'). Nice thing about the shelves was that I could buy a short strip (it was maybe 12U) and if I'd outgrown it I could've just removed a shelf and added another strip.
- m463 3y ago
  Thing is, you can get pre-built racks on amazon for < $100 that are both sturdy and designed for it. with removable sides, or casters, or whatever. For a little more you can get nice wooden audio racks that are spouse-friendly.. ish.
  - OJFord 3y ago
    Ok? I chose to build sometbing custom fit to my space, and the rack mounting strip things were <£10 on eBay. Obviously the wood brings it more to '<$100' realm, but I was also just building a shelving unit. My point wasn't really cost anyway, I didn't mention it, my point was just that 'rack' doesn't have to mean floor standing 4-sided 42U behemoth from a supplier surprised to be delivering to a residential address, on which point we're agreeing.
mindslight 3y ago
From a home perspective, the best way to think about a (full depth four post) rack is as an extremely high density shelving for specific types of things. You won't make any gains with one or two machines, or several SBCs in small cases, that you couldn't have made with similar non-rack shelves. Having a few pieces of gear with rack ears not in a rack will forever call to you though. In general I'd either say commit to it (42U and understand you'll be paying a premium for shelves/gear/accessories), or regular shelving will suit you fine.
m463 3y ago
I didn't care about racks either, but I got a 6u desktop rack and mounted a couple of things in it and turns out I love it. - shelf with two mini systems - power strip with individual switches - power strip always-on outlets front/back - ethernet switch - "broom" thing to feed cables through - many-port USB 3 hub other systems are under the desk. It's really convenient. I have hooked some systems to power switches, others are always on. It is organized, takes up space but doesn't fall over, and gives me desktop access to ports if I need them. That said, many years ago I had a server setup where I really organized everything, zip ties for all cables for neatness, etc. I turned out to be a pain every time I rewired something (cut zip ties, etc). I eventually learned there's a neat and organized vs flexibility balance you have to maintain.
jbverschoor 3y ago
Get a DIN-rail and some mounting brackets

by cybrox 3y ago

NelsonMinar 3y ago

From what I've seen on reddit's /r/homelab, the neat thing about racked systems is you can buy very cheap used hardware that are discards from enterprise uses. There's very little market for an old server or rackmount network switch so you can get very good bargains. Personally I buy new cheap mini PCs and consumer networking stuff. That's another way to get bargains, since consumer hardware is so cheap. But I'm a bit jealous of the enterprise capabilities like proper managed switches or remote managed servers.

mech422 3y ago
The down side to the old enterprise servers is the power draw. I had 2 Dell blade server chassis and 1 HP blade server chassis that used Xeon based blades. The electric bill was UNREAL with 10+ blades running at once. I do use Dell PowerConnect manged switches from EBay, but tbh for what I do, TP Link switches work really well and are cheap. They support VLANs, MAC Lans, SNMP, SSH/Web configuration, etc etc - basically fully managed switches. And they have been rock solid as 'edge' switches for each room in the house. The powerconnects basically work as top-of-rack switches for pulling all the different rooms/rack into 1 feed to the cable modem.
- blackfawn 3y ago
  Agreed. Power draw and often noise on enterprise equipment is ridiculous in a home setting. I try to stick to the small form factor (SFF) or ultra-small form factor (USFF) computers whenever I can, which is what the author is using. I used to use Raspberry Pi boards for some things but always ran into problems w/ microSD cards dying, even with log2ram and buying industrial cards. I haven't had a single issue after switching to tiny x64 machines w/ real SSDs in them. I picked up a HP managed switch that I thought I might use but it draws more power than the ThinkCentre M93p Tiny computers do and it's actively cooled w/ super noisy 1U fan(s) so I'm going to ditch it.
  - nvy 3y ago
    Which x64 machines have you been using? I'm looking for a successor to PC Engines APUs
    - blackfawn 3y ago
      I've been sticking w/ very compact units, mainly ThinkCentre M series "Tiny" and Dell OptiPlex "Micro" form factor, which are both practically identical in size. Both use a laptop power supply. You can get current versions for many hundreds of dollars or generation(s) old ones for as cheap as $30 USD. My most recent ones were older 3rd & 4th gen i5 & i7 CPUs but they still blow current Raspberry Pi, etc. out of the water, have M.2 for network, etc. & SATA for storage. A Dell I have that's a generation newer than these adds NVMe too. It's hard finding these small PCs that have multiple Ethernet but I just added a gigabit Ethernet M.2 card to the one.
    - vially 3y ago
      I was also looking for a successor to the PC Engines APUs and came across https://teklager.se/en/ https://teklager.se/en/ that lists some possible alternatives that you might find interesting. Personally I was looking to build a router so I ended up buying a fanless N100 based mini PC from Aliexpress (e.g.: search term is "N100 firewall appliance") and have been very satisfied with it so far (Proxmox homelab with OPNsense running as a VM).
    - mech422 3y ago
- EvanAnderson 3y ago
  > The down side to the old enterprise servers is the power draw. It depends on the generation of the gear. Stuff coming off-lease in the last 3 - 4 years has been of a generation where lower power draw became a major selling point. In Dell land, for example, the power draw differences are dramatic between the Rx10, Rx20, and newer series. (Basically, throw Rx10 servers in the trash. Rx20 servers are better but still not great.)
- buybackoff 3y ago
  Power draw also comes with terrible noise. They were designed to be in a server room, not a living/bed room.
doublepg23 3y ago
I feel like it’s a harder sell than it used to be because post-Ryzen there’s been real increases in CPU performance. Modern NUCs and prebuilt also having native NVMe is a boon too. All depends on what you’re going for though.
internet101010 3y ago
The caveat to this is noise. People who have never seen a rack server in person don't understand how loud they really are. PSUs, case fans, cpu fans (if applicable) all gotta go. You kind of have to go into it knowing you are going to spend an additional $100-200 replacing it all, and that's assuming you will not have to 3D print a custom bracket to house the new fans.
- freedomben 3y ago
  Yep, the noise is serious. I may not even seem that bad at first, but if you are going to hear it prolonged, it starts to get really unbearable after a 20 minutes of it. I don't know anybody who isn't irritable after a couple hours. And the heat is enough to make a room very uncomfortable. I started my home lab in my office, and it didn't take long to realize that was not an option. Luckily I was able to find a nook under the stairs where I could stash it, but the heat and noise are polar opposite of a productive office environment.
bayindirh 3y ago
What homelab people who do not work with/in a data center daily doesn't realize is how noisy and power hungry is the equipment they procure. They got a managed switch, nice. It has VLANs, stacking, etc. nice. How many 48 port switches you can possibly stack in a home? You got a Sun ZFS7420. Great. That's a rack with two controllers with 1TB RAM each. That thing screams. An entry level 7320 is maybe workable, but you can't do 7420 at home. Same for HPE/Dell/Netapp storage boxen. Doing Infiniband is home is another thing I can't understand. Fiber cables are extremely expensive. Copper is range limited and thick, plus unless you do HPC, its latency and speed doesn't mean much. Go fiber Ethernet. Much more practical. I understand the curiosity and willingness to play, but it's not that practical to play with these at home (noise, space, heat, power wise). I also buy high end consumer hardware. TP-Link has 4/8 port smart managed SOHO switches for example, they even have PoE. Power your Raspi cluster via PoE with less cables and get some respectable computing power with no noise. Neat! No? Dell's Rack servers are generally not noisy at idle, but a 2U server under some real load is unbearable. What's funny that an Intel N95 has the same power with an i7-3770K with better SIMD support while being 4x more efficient, and that thing is not slow by any means.
- isopede 3y ago
  I don't think fiber cables are expensive. I ran CAT6 in my house and at the same time pulled an OS2 single-mode 30m fiber cable to my office for core switching. The 30m fiber cable was $17 on Amazon, plus two 10G-LR modules at $18 each. The equivalent CAT6 is more power hungry, has less range, the cable is the same damn price, and the 10GBase-T SFP->RJ45 transceivers are twice the price of the LR transceivers at $50 each.
  - bayindirh 3y ago
    Infiniband uses its own cables with dedicated/integrated transceivers. It's not compatible with Ethernet and can't be swapped (unless you plan to talk plain Ethernet with your IB card, which is possible). A 5m, 200gbps cable is $1,149.00 a pop [0]. Mind you, this is neither the longest, nor the fastest cable. [0]: https://esaitech.com/products/mellanoxmfs1s00-h005v-200gbps-infiniband-qsfp56-active-optical-cable https://esaitech.com/products/mellanoxmfs1s00-h005v-200gbps-... More cables: https://esaitech.com/search?type=product&options%5Bprefix%5D=last&options%5Bunavailable_products%5D=last&q=product_type%3ACable+AND+Mellanox https://esaitech.com/search?type=product&options%5Bprefix%5D...
yummypaint 3y ago
I haven't seen any mention of going to scrap yards in this thread, but just about every general-purpose yard ive been in has had racks of some kind. Hard to beat scrap price as racks themselves tend to be light when empty.

geek_at 3y ago

I did just the same. Built myself a little movable 6 node rack out of wood. With 3d printed powerbrick holders on the sides and a switch with a 10g uplink so all servers can use the full 1g nic. Warms my home office in the colder months and can be put in the garage on the warmer months. Photo front: https://pictshare.net/qi7zv2.png https://pictshare.net/qi7zv2.png Photo back: https://pictshare.net/llloiw.png https://pictshare.net/llloiw.png Photo of the 3d printed power brick holders: https://pictshare.net/kgffy6.png https://pictshare.net/kgffy6.png [edit] Specs: - 80 Watts during normal load - 50 cores - 9TB nvme storage - 300GB RAM - 3 of them are running proxmox - 3 of them Docker swarm

E39M5S62 3y ago
I can't quite see which Thinkcentre's those are, but the M920x can fit a 10GbE PCIe NIC in it and provide it enough power. I have one on my desk with 2x2TB NVMe, 32GB RAM and a 10GbE fiber connection to it.

idatum 3y ago

In the spirit of "your setup, should be your setup. As traditional or as custom as you’d like!" as mentioned in article, I went with a vertical mount rack. It's not enclosed so it has enough ventilation. The advantage with a vertical rack for me was space savings. Key parts of my home lab are near the low voltage panel (lucky to have in newer house) which does have foot traffic from other household members. Much less risk of someone bumping into the rack.

mech422 3y ago

When I started using SBC's for my home setup, I skipped rPi's. At the time, being ARM based was a bit limiting (IIRC, at the time some stuff still hadn't been ported to ARM). So I went with odroid h2/h3 [0]. X86 based, lots of memory to work with, and much cheaper then a nuc - and uses much less power then my old Dell/HP blade servers from EBay :-) 0) https://ameridroid.com/products/odroid-h3 https://ameridroid.com/products/odroid-h3

nextos 3y ago

Also there are great fanless cases for NUCs and RPis. Actually, Asus has taken over NUCs from Intel and they are releasing fanless machines, so now there is not even the need to mod them.

nucleardog 3y ago

Racks are nice from an organization perspective as well, but agreed it’s an unnecessary complication and expense and limits your options. I run a half dozen Lenovo ThinkCentre tiny PCs I picked up off eBay super cheap. Sure, I could go buy some rack mounts for them all… to the tune of $750. It would look really nice. That’s about it. If I’d decided that was a “requirement” I never would have done any of this. For anyone considering diving in to any of this stuff, don’t let the pursuit of “perfect” stop you before you’ve even started. My PCs are quite content sitting in a pile with some scraps of wood shoved between to help with airflow.

noobermin 3y ago

This is because like many things this is a rich man's hobby. See mechanical keyboards for example.

CharlesW 3y ago
There's always the $70 IKEA Lack Rack: https://www.instructables.com/The-$70-IKEA-Mini-Server-Rack/ https://www.instructables.com/The-$70-IKEA-Mini-Server-Rack/
- noobermin 3y ago
  Most of the things on r/homelab and elsewhere are not wooden racks. Most are expensive server racks retrofitted to be vanity projects to serve videos to at most 2 people in a home. It's fine, it's just that people should be honest about what these are.
  - Fnoord 3y ago
    Interesting you mention 2 people. I got kids. So I got a lot of toys in the living room. The small office I got, does contain a printer, a PC, a space for my laptop plus dock, a server, a switch, and a small cluster. But what I don't have is more space. I don't have space for a rack. Furthermore I've been replacing industrial grade fans (in switches, desktop, the cluster and the like) which make a lot of noise (and cool very well) with Noctua which are expensive and have less CFM but are silent enough.
BadHumans 3y ago
You can get into custom mechanical keyboards for under 50 dollars. I don't think you understand what you are talking about.
- bowsamic 3y ago
  Don’t be disingenuous he’s obviously not referring to that part of the mechanical keyboard community

Semaphor 3y ago

In my experience, homelab means high powered or at least a lot of compute. People like me who have tiny, power saving devices are in the selfhosted communities. There's no definition like that, but it happens to turn out that way.

didntcheck 3y ago
You can add "data hoarder" to the Venn diagram too!
- Semaphor 3y ago
  Fair enough, kinda works with neither group. Usually not enough compute for homelab, but care way too much about storage for selfhosted stuff.

atomicnumber3 3y ago

I am honestly kind of anti-rack at this point. "Deals" on used enterprise are IME dreadful unless you can get in on your own employer offloading old stuff, which requires you to a) even have an onprem setup at all and b) be friendly enough with the IT/NOC people that they give you a tip when it's going to happen. (For me b seems to happen naturally so it's really all on a). eBay is a fools game, terrible prices. Craigslist is usually the same sellers too. Maybe some people live behind an Amazon datacenter or something, I unfortunately live in a city where the only reason we have Amazon 2-day shipping is because we're a major shipping hub. And anything that does resemble a good deal is ancient Opterons that are literally e-waste these days. So anyway, sorry, my whole point here is that most people are actually going to be running a ton of old enterprise stuff that is actually rackmountable with good sliding rails. You're either building whiteboxes in a 4U rosewill case or you're putting stuff on rack-mountable shelves. The rosewill cases theoretically have sliding rails but they're awful, just awful. So you're either using shelf rails or literal shelves which tends to throw off efficient utilization of the U's available in the rack - shelf rails usually result in a dead U either above or below them, and shelves obviously have similar effects. So yeah. As someone who owns a rack (4-post open rack), if you asked me, I'd say just go buy one of those big heavy duty Lowe's shelf units and ask for extra shelf inserts so you can have more, but less-tall shelves. Boom, you now have something that'll hold anything and is way better than fucking around with rack nuts and shelf rails and stuff. Love homelabs in general, though.

sophacles 3y ago
10-15 years ago the deals were real. I picked up a lot of off-lease and/or used stuff on ebay really cheap. As more and more companies move to cloud, and as more people get into homelabs, prices on decent gear have gone up. I was starting to think the good times were over in 2018 and in 2020 I stopped defaulting to ebay when I saw a great lot getting broken up and sold cheap suddenly pull all their stuff and relist it at much higher prices - "the scrappers are on to us" is what I realized. These days I've been replacing the guts of my old servers with mini-itx setups for the most part. It does what I need and lets me shove 2 or 3 nodes into a 2u case so I can keep the aesthetic of "a personal rack".
mindslight 3y ago

OJFord 3y ago

Or as a compromise, you can buy strips of appropriately spaced/sized square-punched metal angle; before I moved I built a shelf unit designed so that the depth of the shelf was correct (19" between posts plus a bit for the sheet metal thickness) for a rack, I had access to the side so I had a combination shelf & rack. People do similarly with Ikea tables ('lack rack'). Nice thing about the shelves was that I could buy a short strip (it was maybe 12U) and if I'd outgrown it I could've just removed a shelf and added another strip.

m463 3y ago
Thing is, you can get pre-built racks on amazon for < $100 that are both sturdy and designed for it. with removable sides, or casters, or whatever. For a little more you can get nice wooden audio racks that are spouse-friendly.. ish.
- OJFord 3y ago
  Ok? I chose to build sometbing custom fit to my space, and the rack mounting strip things were <£10 on eBay. Obviously the wood brings it more to '<$100' realm, but I was also just building a shelving unit. My point wasn't really cost anyway, I didn't mention it, my point was just that 'rack' doesn't have to mean floor standing 4-sided 42U behemoth from a supplier surprised to be delivering to a residential address, on which point we're agreeing.

mindslight 3y ago

From a home perspective, the best way to think about a (full depth four post) rack is as an extremely high density shelving for specific types of things. You won't make any gains with one or two machines, or several SBCs in small cases, that you couldn't have made with similar non-rack shelves. Having a few pieces of gear with rack ears not in a rack will forever call to you though. In general I'd either say commit to it (42U and understand you'll be paying a premium for shelves/gear/accessories), or regular shelving will suit you fine.

m463 3y ago

I didn't care about racks either, but I got a 6u desktop rack and mounted a couple of things in it and turns out I love it. - shelf with two mini systems - power strip with individual switches - power strip always-on outlets front/back - ethernet switch - "broom" thing to feed cables through - many-port USB 3 hub other systems are under the desk. It's really convenient. I have hooked some systems to power switches, others are always on. It is organized, takes up space but doesn't fall over, and gives me desktop access to ports if I need them. That said, many years ago I had a server setup where I really organized everything, zip ties for all cables for neatness, etc. I turned out to be a pain every time I rewired something (cut zip ties, etc). I eventually learned there's a neat and organized vs flexibility balance you have to maintain.

jbverschoor 3y ago

Get a DIN-rail and some mounting brackets