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The original was posted on /r/homelab by /u/UnGeekenMunich on 2025-01-18 10:03:33+00:00.
I wanted to share with you guys for a while, and finally decided to do so. I always wanted to have a rack with my homelab, so when we move to our new small flat I decided to go for it. Location is at the entrance, I built a cabinet for the coats and claimed a bit of the space for the rack. I asked the construction company to get empty tubes for the cables and enough power at this exact location. As you can see, it was 100% WAF, there is nothing to see except a small intake for the fans. A brief summary:
- Cabinets are IKEA METOD: they're cheap and you can modify them as you please. I cut the lower ones to have 3 drawers instead of 4.
- Rack is placed in the upper-right two doors (joined)
- Rack is made our of extruded aluminum, quite fun and cheap to make.
- Since I don't have place for accessing the back (problem!), I placed the rack into a sliding platform
- Platform is using rails for firefighters/campervans with a loading of 225kg (rack weight is around 60kg)
- Lights are LED Stripes carved into the METOD panels, with door sensor (like a fridge)
- Ventilation is also a problem, so the rack is modified to have 2 14mm fan as intake, 2 14mm fan as exhaust, with sensors at both places to monitor temperatures in & out. Controlled by an ESP32 with display
- Content of the rack:
- Unifi network setup with UDM-SE and USW-AGG 10 Gbe
- Low depth server with i5-13500 with 64 GB RAM and 2 + 4 TB NVMe (Samsung 990 Pro), this runs all my LXCs and VMs. Also attached to a PiKVM for remote management.
- Synology RS1221+ with 40TB of pool capacity (half of the bays are empty)
- Some PIs for monitoring, mission critical stuff and pihole/adguard, all powered with POE. This panel is for the non-technical people in the house, that can come here and easily reset VMs in case some it's not responding
- Front facing switches attached to Shellys to have control on the power and remote monitoring
- APC UPS.
It's been almost two years and it works great, temperatures are always within reasonable values (39-40 degrees). I needed to do a few maintenance tasks and the platform works really great, just slide it out and do your stuff. But I have to admit that is scary to trust such a thing with all the weight :) In any case, I did many many many calculations about every single detail (even the screws used to attach the rails), so I over dimensioned everything. Just in case!
What do you think?
PD: I love racks and I love woodworking :)
Closed cabinet - Rack uses the two upper-right doors, below is my 3D Printer
UPDATE: Some more pics on the intake/exhaust:
UPDATE2: More pics of the interface, in case someone gets inspired: