Server Rack Installed in Home Computer Lab

J has been learning some of the newer Microsoft technologies, such as XAML. Part of his ongoing endeavors is a writing Craigslist parser and viewer. Without having to go through the website, he found someone in town who was selling server racks at 10-20% of their retail price.

The seller’s story is that his workplace was throwing them out and he offered to dispose of them free of charge, while possibly profiting off them as part of his other job, moonlighting as a salvager. He seemed like a good enough guy, so I can reasonably assume his story probably checks out.

So I went and viewed the server racks. He had five left (Apparently he had already sold half his stock); each 42U tall. Some had wheels, some had shelves; one even had two large top exhaust fans. I was half tempted to buy out his stock and resell them on eBay for four times as much. Alas, the responsible half of my brain beat the bejeezus out of the fun half.

I ended up buying the smallest one. Still 42U, with wheels; it barely fit in J’s SUV. It came with four sets of slide rails, a KVM switch, and a combo console keyboard/trackball. It took about 20 minutes to load and unload it from the truck; and half an hour to get it up the stairs to the lab.

So we finally got the rack sitting next to the desks. Needless to say, the sites were down for several hours while I racked everything up. I’ve installed all my rackmount hardware properly with square nuts and some very basic power management. By management, of course, I mean two power strips are velcroed to the rear of the rack.

Installed hardware:

• 4U: \\Hive: My file server, web server, media server, SQL server, and FTP server. One of its many duties is to serve this website and several others.
• 2U: 2x 24-port 10/100 Fast Ethernet switches. They have pass-through and software management capabilities, but I don’t know how to use them nor have the software. In the meantime, at least that’s an extra 46 ports at my disposal.
• .5U: 4-way KVM switch
• .5U: Console keyboard/trackball combo

I also put my non-rackable network hardware on top of the KVM: The cable modem, DSL modem, routers (One per WAN connection), and Gigabit switch.

That totals 7U of rackmounted equipment, giving me 35U for future expansion. Yeah, it’s a bit much; I was planning to get a half-size rack until this deal came along. However, for $150, I wasn’t about to turn up this deal. I just wish Compaq’s name wasn’t strewn all about as if it were applied with a shotgun. More images follow.