Nerdzone

My homelab hardware gets its own rack

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This project started a long time ago. When I planned the hardware needs for my homelab, I also thought of getting a rack. I had a real IT rack in mind, as you know it from your daily business, maybe back in the days when at least some stuff was on-premises and not everything in the cloud. I wanted to get a small rack with enough space to mount my whole homelab hardware into it, to have a proper cabling solution, and to have flexibility in case my homelab gets an extension.

But that wasn’t easy. There are various flavors of racks. The normal 42 unit IT rack, half-hight racks, and also various wall-mountable racks for patch panels, switches, and smaller devices. I was thinking and tinkering, looking for specs. But in the end, nothing satisfied me. Well, at least not from a price perspective, of being not able to transport it. And then, there was something going on on Twitter:

https://twitter.com/widmerkarl/status/1175392396974145542

Thanks to my colleague Michael Schroeder I’ve found something. He mentioned his IKEA rack, and that made me curious. Earlier in June, my colleague Fred Hofer announced that he moved his hardware into a bigger rack and that it was easier as when he moved from an IKEA Lack rack to the small rack:

https://twitter.com/Fred_vBrain/status/1267580223727550470

And that was the trigger! Why not building my own rack and tailor it to my needs? I don’t have to spend much money on a real IT rack, and I can do something handcrafted. The rack didn’t have to be anything special, there was not much in my personal specification book.

That’s the specifications planned:

  • Small (not full 42 rack units)
  • It should be lightweight
  • Enough space for at least three servers, some switches, and a NAS (or two)
  • Enough space for future homelab upgrades
  • Extensible, if needed
  • Should withstand some weight
  • Wheels!

The idea of building my own IKEA Lack Rack was born.

This whole homelab IKEA Lack Rack story will be covered in a small blog series. This blog post will start the series with some planning stuff, the first pictures, and the BOM, as far as I can provide it already. At least the BOM will be updated if there is a reason for it.

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Nerdzone – a new category on my blog

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Just recently I stumbled across a tweet from VMware, showing some virtualized operating systems on a Red Hat system:

I didn’t know that VMware software was running on Red Hat. I know the earlier ESX Server which you could install on Windows Server (something like VMware Workstation, but for business workloads), and I know the early ESX bare-metal hypervisor. But I wasn’t aware of Red Hat running VMware software. But there’s always something new to learn, isn’t it?

That led me to the fact that I have to install some old operating systems as well, just to see if I’m still able to do so (with some of them, it’s not just Next, Next, Finish) and if they can run on modern virtualized hardware. And they do!

I’m not sure if I’ll install more old operating systems. Probably I do. But I decided to create a new blog category here, called the “Nerdzone”.

I’ll put everything into this category which has to do with tech, but it’s not directly related to other categories on my blog. For example, I’ll put a blog post here where I’m writing about the installation of old operating systems, like a guide or something.

Until this blog post, and some other will come, this is just an announcement for now 😉