The homelab had outgrown the shelf. It was a tower, two Mini PCs, a switch and a NAS, all balanced on an Ikea unit with the cables held back by velcro and optimism. Every time I touched one thing, something else lost power. So I did what everyone in this position eventually does. I bought a rack.
A second-hand 24U cabinet, collected from a chap who was decommissioning an office, for the price of a decent meal out. It is the best money I have spent on this hobby and also the start of several new regrets, which is roughly what I was promised.
the good part
Racking everything is genuinely transforming. Rails, a proper PDU, a shelf for the things that will never be rackmount, and a patch panel so the cabling has somewhere to land. For the first time I can trace a cable end to end without unplugging three others by accident. The switch has a home. The NAS has a home. Airflow goes front to back instead of in whatever direction the dust preferred.
I labelled both ends of every cable. If you take one thing from this, take that. Future me, six months from now and mid-outage, will be the grateful beneficiary of present me with a label printer.
the regrets
The garage is not a data centre, and it spent this week reminding me. The regrets, in order of how much they have cost me sleep:
- Damp. A garage in March is cold and humid. I have a cheap hygrometer in there now and it is reading higher than I would like. Electronics and condensation do not get along. I am eyeing a small dehumidifier.
- Heat, later. It is fine now. Come July, a sealed metal box full of spinning disks in an uninsulated garage is going to bake. I have left the rack door off and I am already thinking about a thermostatically switched fan.
- Noise. I swapped the loudest 1U server's fans for Noctuas, because the original fans sounded like a hairdryer auditioning for a jet engine, and the garage shares a wall with a bedroom.
- Power. It is all on one domestic ring with no UPS yet. That is next month's problem and next month's money.
Would I do it again? Yes, immediately. The rack solved the actual problem, which was that I could no longer reason about my own setup. The new problems are environmental, and environmental problems have boring, buyable solutions. Cabling chaos just makes you sad. Damp makes you buy a dehumidifier, which is at least a finite amount of sad.