In the style of Blur, “Shelf Life!”. Under the desk lives the servers and a zillion dust bunnies and long forgotten cables… but what was I going to do about them. Join me as I tidy up and find a great way to store gear….
Stowing the various server and bits in the Codepope laboratory has been challenging (omnes: because of the mess) because I never really got around to tidying it up for a long while.
Finally, having to house a new NAS and VM engine room forced me, oh yes forced me, to take action. And the first stop was solving the shelf problem.
Finding a shelf
You see all my server boxes live under the desk. It’s a tall enough desk but it left me scratching my head for what to use. Having previously fudged around the problem with small wooden pedestals and sticking mini pc holders on its side, this was an odd space to fill. Shelves exist at the right height but end up being wirey willowy things you’d rather not put a six drive NAS on, let alone that and a four drive NAS.
Oh and before anyone asks. Yes, I had a half height rack before and it was HELL. Racks are great for a permanant configuration, but you don’t half pay for it and when you do need to fix something, goodness it’s a lot of messing about.
For this, I wanted a not-rack. Something solid which could take all the gear in an accessible way.
Shelf life
Enhet turned out to be the solution. It’s one of Ikea’s ranges for kitchen fittings and includes shelves of various heights forged out of solid metal with stiffeners and metal shelves to stow things on. I went for this 60x60x40 variant and the struggle became real.
But first came removing of the current kit and the cables. And oh my, when we got to the old school phone extension running through, I calculated that the last time I’d done this was possibly 15 years ago. Kids, don’t let it be that long. Sometimes, too, some wires are just easier to cut, like the mysterious cables running to elsewhere.
With all the cables out of the way, we moved onto the next phase. Dropping the desk into place. Its a super cramped space and getting out the existing shelves let me drop the Enhet in. Then take it out as I discovered it wouldn’t sit comfortably on an MDF sound dampening panel bolted to the floor. Cue ripping out more stuff and replacing that with a slab of proper sound dampening material.
Advice for all
Always remove everything before doing a job like this. The tempation to try and reorganise around running kit is high but that’s how I got into this mess in the first place. Doing a clear out gives you more space to think about how you are going to organise what goes into the space too. If you are going to do this, try and give yourself a couple of hours between clearing out and installing your kit back in. You never know when inspiration may strike.
What goes in the not-rack?
With the Enhet shelves in place, the rebuilding of the server pile could begin. Core to all of this is a Synology NAS which had got a 10Gbe interface added to it, but for a long while ran at 2.5Gbe because of available switches. Well, now it talks to a mostly 2.5Gbe switch which happens to have a 10Gbe port on it.
There’s some neat switches coming out of China with good prices on them, so that switch is also the core to the network. There’s another recently built NAS from Asustor too, 2.5Gbe but solely dedicated to being a backup to the big NAS. At some point it’ll go live elsewhere in the house and then elsewhere elsewhere, but for now it impersonates a big drive I can rsync everything to.
On top of all this storage are three machines. Two of them are from Minisforum, one a typical tiny PC which does a lot of the home server work, and the other an MS-01 workstation which is stuffed with 96GB of RAM and running Proxmox so it can impersonate the kind of tech setups I may need. No long term plan on that, but a great learning space. Finally, it’s the Turing Pi 2. I mentioned it before here but it is finally built, stuffed full of 32GB RK1 boards and 4TB of SSD. That’s going to be stepping up as a K8S cluster in a box real soon now.
Wrapping up the not-rack
With all this reorganisation and tidying, it’s been worth it to just clear space. And do things like finally get a UPS in that works with the NAS for that little bit more protection.
Anyway, short version, checkout Enhet shelving. It feels great for stowing your active kit without getting all racky.
Until next time chums. Share your not-racks with me as @codepope on Mastodon and do tell me what I’m missing in my not-rack!