I recently moved and had the most geeky problem there is:
Where do I put my servers and the coffee maker?
I've read a lot of things about Lack Racks, where people use the 7€ LACK table from IKEA to mount rackmountable servers. But since I have neither a rackmountable server nor the table at home I had to think of something else to house my two servers.
I did however have an old KALLAX (former EXPIDIT) shelf and this is how I built it:
For the impatient here is the final result:
The building process
Cable management
For cable management I was using pipe holders since they are much cheaper than any solution that had "cable" or "management" in their names. These are about 4 Cents (€ cents) a piece (2€ for a bag of 22 pieces). I mounted them with one screw per holder because this way I'm able to add/remove cables without needing to unscrew the whole thing.
Roller Skates
Since I know I have to change cables every now and then I felt the need to mount some kind of rolls to the bottom of the rack so I can move it easily without any danger to the servers. So I picked up a few furniture rollers and mounted them with some screws
Modem and router
I've been provided a Thompson modem/router from my ISP. This thing really really sucks so I bought an additional router and configured the modem to be just a modem and let my router do all the routing
I installed the modem sideways in the lowest segment so I can easily check the LEDs and reset it if it doesn't do what it's told.
Since my Linksys router is also my AP I mounted it on the top left side of the self
The Servers
Here you can see the pipe holders with one screw each. I've put the NAS in for fitting
And added the power cables and the Xeon server
The switch
To connect all devices I bought a Cisco 8 port Gigabit smart switch that can be mounted nicely next to the Xeon server.
At this point I realized that the switch's power cable has to be connected on it's side. Nope.. not the side facing down -.-
Much better here!
The pipe holders are doing their job like they've never done anything else in their lives!
Finished
The coffee maker fits in place perfectly and since it's not used very often I don't think the steam will affect any of the servers.
Let me know, what you think about this project!
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