My Dad walked into my nerd cave and saw it. His response: “Oh. My. God.” Not the “this is totally awesome” OMG, but the “what the hell is wrong with you?” OMG. What was it that I had done? Did I take a sledge hammer to my computers? Did I paint the room pink? Did I take a crap on the floor? No! I built a server rack:
In living room, after assembly
Since I love being at work so much, I decided to make my house look like it. Who needs peace and quiet when you can have 2 80mm fans roaring away? It’s the way computing should be.
Ordering
For a long time, I’ve been running at least 2 FreeBSD servers in my house for various purposes. Purpose #1 is to screw around. As I’ve moved around from place to place, I’ve gotten annoyed with running crappy looking desktops and the mess of cables that go along with them. I wanted a clean, organized solution, and started reading up on server racks. I started looking around and quickly realized that racks and rackable equipment is really expensive. Luckily I ran across the inexpensive, 27U, 2 post rack on CableOrganizer.com. I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to pull it off until I realized that Newegg.com has a bunch of server cases that fit ATX and Micro ATX motherboards. I thought this one looked pretty good. After a few months daydreaming about the joy of rack ownership, I pulled the trigger.
Assembling the Rack
Once, the rack came in the mail, putting it together was pretty easy. I had ordered a 2U shelf along with the rack to store my network equipment on.
In position
Unfortunately, the top unit of space on the rack is being taken up by the cross bar holding the two posts together. If I really need it, I can probably remove the cross bar, relying on the equipment to hold the rack together.
Assembling the Server and Mounting
I had an old desktop lying around that was a good candidate for a new server. It started out as a pretty decent barebones kit, and was packing an Athlon 64 3200+ and 1GB of RAM. It already had an 80 GB hard drive, but I decided to use that for the OS and add a 1.5 TB drive for storing whatever I could think of. Rather than go into details of the assembly, I’ll show it in pictures, like a storybook for nerds:
There once was a 4U server case, sitting in Morpheus's chair...
This little server case needed a new brain, so he went to the workshop...
The powerful wizard gave the little server case a brain...
After giving the case a brain, the wizard also gave the case a new home in rackland, along with two friends: Routy and Modulator Demodulator...
The story doesn’t mention that the wizard had to surgically remove the case’s handles in order to fit it on the rack. They are apparently intended more for when the case is installed using rails on a 4 post rack.
Sadly, a rack mountable UPS wasn’t in this wizard’s budget, so a standard desktop model had to do. Connected to it are the server, the cable modem and router, and a monitor that is connected to the server.
OS and Additional Software
For the server’s operating system, I used FreeBSD 8.0. I’m using apcupsd to manage the UPS. I intend to get samba up and running to provide an easy way for my wife and me to store and share files. I would like to someday use HEYU, Xtend, and MisterHouse to be the brain of an X10 enabled smart home. I also want to host virtual machines using VirtualBox and access them remotely from any computer, even away from the house.
Future Plans
In the near future, I plan on moving the rack into my nerd cave’s closet. For some reason, there are not one, but two electrical outlets in there. Perfect! Also, since I have 20U of space left, I eventually want to expand:
- Second server (4U)
- Drawer to store manuals, tools, and extra parts(2U)
- UPS (1U)
- Switch (1U)
Even that leaves 12 more U of space. The possibilities are endless. Mmmm, rack mountable beer tap…