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Comment by cillian64 | Hacker News Reader

I’m always sad that 10”/10.5” racks aren’t more common for this sort of thing. I have my “homelab” in one and it’s the perfect size for a home router, an 8 port switch, a Raspberry Pi, a Thinkcentre tiny, and a 1-bay NAS.

Basically nothing actually rack-mounts in 10.5” so I currently have things cable-tied to shelves, but I’m planning to 3d print some adaptors.

My setup: https://i.postimg.cc/xTpLPFQD/image.jpg

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Yeah, though one of the benefits of a 19" standard rack is you can pick up old data center gear cheap. Including some exotic stuff (like the big blue Palo Alto Networks box I owned, until the novelty wore off).

For mixing small gear with it, there's a lot to be said for rackmount shelves, including with zip ties or velcro.

For people that really only want something small, I've seen people 3D print out of plastic, build out of wood, IKEA desk organizers and furniture...

This is what I did. My wife had an IKEA Besta media center cabinet and it's already mounted beneath our television. I just re-purposed it and put in a homemade NAS, router, switch, and some fanless mini-PCs as my server cluster. The downside is no ventilation, but I got out the jigsaw and cut holes in the cabinet and stuck USB fans with magnetic dust filters in them. Has worked fine for two years now. Upside is everything is small and quiet and I didn't need additional furniture to put servers in. You have to get Windows off the mini-PCs, but since Arch started bundling cloud-init with their installer media, I just put my configuration scripts on a USB stick with the cidata label on the disk, plug that in with the installer, hit the power button, and system installation up to configuring ssh so I can get in from my laptop happens unattended without me needing to hook up to a keyboard and monitor.

Back when my Bride and I were living in a one bedroom apartment, she looked at my jumble of computers around my desk and asked "why not just get one big box?". I was browsing/shopping at Lockheed's outlet store, and stumbled across a glorious Sun 180 server with a 19", 8' tall rack. Only $25! Who could resist! We picked it up and my Bride was horrified to discover the refrigerator sized machine next to my desk. It is still used today - though it is holding a bunch of servers in the basement rather than front and center in my office.

The 3/180? Awesome score.

That's the "one big box" version of the 3/75 and pair of Sun shoeboxes that I once bought for home. (Bought used, from the local Sun office, which would occasionally email out of list old gear to sysadmins at customer sites, but for quite a lot more money than $25, unfortunately.)

Hopefully the 3/180 isn't as crazy-loud as the big old 4/390 that my employer was still using for email and some NFS.

The model showed 180, but the part was 3/280s-8r1, with all the upgrades! The actual hardware was dead - but it had all the panels and covers for the rack including the SCSI access. The original 180 chassis has housed everything from a pentium 90 to a 32-core threadripper. A fun bit of history. Hanging a mini-itx board in there was a bit comical for a few years, when folks were asking to see what was inside that monster.

Giant box to the right of the desk :) https://i.imgur.com/SpMMPXQ.jpg

Ikea lack tables can double as a rack.

IME it's very difficult to find hardware for 10" racks in the US.

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