from the this-would-make-my-basement-a-lot-less-cluttered dept.
Wiki-style guide compiles all the pieces and potential of a rack you can carry:
I have one standard rack appliance in my home: a Unifi Dream Machine Pro. It is mounted horizontally in a coat closet, putting it close to my home's fiber input and also incidentally keeping our jackets gently warm. I can fit juuuuuust about one more standard rack-size device in there (maybe a rack-mount UPS?) before I have to choose between outer-wear and overly ambitious networking. Were I starting over, I might think a bit more about scalability.
Along those lines, technologist and YouTube maker Jeff Geerling has launched the Project Mini Rack page for folks who have similarly server-sized ambitions, coupled with a lack of square footage. "I mean, if you want to cosplay as a sysadmin, you need a rack, right?" Geerling says in the announcement video. It's a keen launching point for a new "homelab" or "minilab" project, also known as bringing the networking and hardware challenges of a commercial network deployment into your home for "fun."
It's a good time fall into the compact computing space. As Geerling notes in a blog post announcing the project, there's a whole lot of small-form-factor PCs on the market. You can couple them with single-board computers, power-over-Ethernet devices, and network-accessible solid state drives that allow you to stuff a whole lab into a cube you can carry around in your hands.
[...] "The community feedback around Project Mini Rack has been great so far," Geerling wrote in an email to Ars. The 3D-printed links and suggestions have been showing up steadily since he started committing to the page in earnest in mid-January. He's particularly excited to see that a "LACK rack," or using IKEA shelving for budget rack mounting, can be downscaled to mini-rack size with an Edet cabinet. "It's like someone at IKEA is a Homelab enthusiast," says Geerling.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 26, @12:32PM (1 child)
This is all very nice for networking and such.
I've got a stereo beast (big old theater speakers, bi-amped, line-level crossover, etc) to tame and this rack size would be handy. Anyone know if there is audio manufacturer support for the mini-rack form factor?
One way forward could start from car audio, but running everything off 12V seems silly because the amplifiers need an inverter to raise the voltage for power amps.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 26, @01:23PM
I pulled my car audio from a vehicle that was in an accident with the desire to run it as a standalone radio. I pulled it mainly because it was after-market purchased and the vehicle was going to be totaled, and I figured it would be a fun project. I hadn't thought much about the power requirements or implications, but my intention is more for a countertop radio than it is for replacing a hi-fi system. But unfortunately it is one of a number of projects that I haven't gotten out of the to-do stage (such as the Arduino-controlled coffee roaster using a hot air popcorn popper project . . . ).
(Score: 2) by Unixnut on Sunday January 26, @02:23PM (3 children)
I don't see the point of defining a new rack standard for the "home lab" rather than just using existing standards.
So now rather than being able to buy standard 19" rack hardware (new or second hand, or even for free if you live near Universities or similar techy areas) you now would need to 3d print your own cases or buy custom smaller "10 inch" cases for your mini rack?
If you really want a smaller width rack, you can at least look at following the de-facto "half-width" rack standard of 8.5 inches (to allow 2x half width devices to take up one 19" rack with space for mounting ears) as that widens the kit you can buy to some COTS parts, but even then the kit you can buy that fits in that rack width is limited (and more expensive) compared to the full width stuff available.
How small are peoples places that they lack space for a 19" width rack but have space for a 10" rack? Are things that tight that 9 inches make that much of a difference? My first home lab rack was in fact the IKEA "LACK rack" back in 2006, when I lived in a flat of 34m² (just under 400ft²). It lived in my living room and doubled up as a coffee table. Since then I've always had some kind of rack system, including using those "2U" rack cases usually used for audio equipment that has to be lugged to gigs. Now I have a half height 19" open frame rack which sits on the terrace of my current rental (58m²/~600ft²) primarily so I don't have to listen to the noise (and deal with the faint acid smell from the UPS batteries).
The main issue having a home lab in my experience was noise and heat output. I can put a rack in a broom cupboard to deal with the noise, but without any cooling it will rapidly overheat in there, so you would need to make modifications for cooling (hard to do in a rental, but possible if you own your place).
Funny thing is, for me a rack is becoming less required for a home lab. Originally my home lab had 5-8 machines in there (1U and 2U mostly) plus switches and routers. In the years since I replaced all of them with a single machine that is more powerful than all of them combined, and just virtualised everything (either containers/jails or full fat VMs). My power bill is lower too (combined continuous minimum power draw is 190W, max 280W under full load) compared to my existing setup.
Now I have a 4U FreeBSD server that runs everything virtualised, a switch and a router for the internet. Most of the rack is now empty, so I started putting old hardware in there like VHS and audio tape decks, so I can start digitising my old collections but once that is done I won't really have a need for the rack.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Sunday January 26, @03:53PM (2 children)
I don't like the time and effort of single point of hardware failure taking it all down, so I have several small servers in a proxmox cluster with HA. So when theres an inevitable failure I don't have an outage and don't have to drop everything and fix it right now. Usually just a dead PS or failed HDD/SSD "I'll fix that tomorrow who cares".
You pretty much need 3 to make HA work, more in parallel helps a lot with CEPH bandwidth.
(Score: 2) by Unixnut on Sunday January 26, @04:48PM (1 child)
Do you have that many failures in a SOHO environment that you need a cluster? I don't think I've had a HW failure cause an outage on the main server well... in the last 10 years at least. The ZFS array has prevented any data loss for as long as a I can remember, but I still do 6-monthly backups just in case. The odd time a disk dies I just pull it out of the sled and replace it, the array can tolerate two failures before risk of data loss.
Performance and latency of the array is much better than CEPH, not to mention nowhere near as problematic (which is why in all the clusters that I've worked on, CEPH and other distributed storage systems were not considered for production)
My main issue was occasional brown-outs and power blips which were solved with the UPS (in of itself a freebie cast off, but needed a new lead-acid battery), but that would take out a SOHO cluster just the same.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday January 27, @02:59PM
For me its the time investment to urgently fix it and the possibility of permanent data loss.
I like the idea of separate chassis.
Also Proxmox clusters are fun, as is setting up K8S on them, etc.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by VLM on Sunday January 26, @03:48PM (1 child)
I really don't see the point of having to rebuy everything at full list price to be 9 inches narrower. Stuff thats incompatible with everything I own and everything in the used market and almost everything in the new market is not terribly interesting to me.
I like buying last generation stuff for nearly free and it just bolts right in. I STILL have tons of stuff (well, hundreds of pounds at least) in racks at home that came from amateur radio hamfests and the like for essentially free. This is a really great source of shelves and if you rack its inevitable you'll have some stuff that can only sit on a shelf. Like a splitter feeding two RTL-SDR radios or some weird power brick.
You can pay $25 to $50 for a rack at amazon and it'll be nice and new, or pay less than scrap price at a hamfest; your choice. Also hamfests are a good source of rackmount UPS hardware; sure the battery is toast but who cares batteries are cheap compared to new rack mount UPS prices. I also like buying used cable management and used power management. "Everyone knows" that ethernet ports on hamfest switches are always broken and its a hassle to discover and work around; in my experience the complaints are overblown. There's some broken stuff and plenty of forklift upgraded stuff that got tossed, so just buy 2 or 3 of everything to have some spares and at least one will work perfectly.
A couple observations from decades of multiple racks in my house for both old electronics gear (HP rack mounted everything, etc) and computer server and networking equipment:
You can move the rack before its filled, maybe not after. Some of this stuff is heavy and you may have to reinstall wiring to move a rack even 3 inches after installation. Consider it bolted to the floor even if it isn't.
Steel racks at a hamfest are cheaper than 2x4 homemade racks with screws
ACCESS is KEY. Way too easy to wedge something underneath the stairs and that inevitable Murphys Law style means you'll need to get in there to fish a cable or something.
Just like the 'pros' at work the main problem is not turning the wiring into an unusable bowl of spaghetti.
Generally you'll have more dust and spiders at home than at work; design for vacuum cleaner access LOL.
No need to rush. Some of this stuff is heavy and you'll get hurt if you're in a hurry. On the other hand if you have other hobbies, something like a transmission jack makes it easy to install even the heaviest things.
Unless you're trying to collect seven nines of reliability as a hobby, its a good idea to single point of failure your electrical system so you can yank one plug or shut off one UPS and depower the entire rack for safety. You or a family member smell smoke? Its literally one wall plug or one UPS button for the entire thing. Wouldn't wire a workplace server cluster like that, but my hobbies are not a workplace and I'm more interested in safety.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by aafcac on Monday January 27, @02:22AM
This isn't really for people to rebuy, although they'd probably like it if you did, this is more for people that don't already have a rack and wouldn't need a full one now that a smaller option is available. I've personally got a small NAS and a Raspberry Pi 4 based video server. And a Home Assistant Green. This sort of thing would be potentially appealing to me as the stuff I have doesn't take up that much stuff, but stuffing it into a small form factor rack would make it a lot neater.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Monday January 27, @04:17PM
This is a fun/interesting thing. However as a "standard" it makes almost no sense. I could have a home server with a rack mount, etc. I even have a closet I could put it in. However, it would take a significant amount of time and money to setup and even more time+money for maintenance to get things done properly. Now, introduce non-standard sizes, with potentially special motherboards, compact this that and the other thing. More time to fiddle with tiny things and more money, because "special". Assuming you're doing it as a "fun project" that you like, sure. As a "standard" there's not enough of a market.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"