Building a Homelab Server Rack!

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Kitrano – Slow Evening
Jalowo – Luminism (ft. Yonderling)

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Timestamps:
00:00 Intro
00:38 Why?
01:45 Choosing the components
03:30 Transplanting the server
06:15 New hard drives
06:53 Rack tour
10:46 Outro

[JeffGeerling]

Can't wait for next year's video, "I outgrew my 12U rack and upgraded to a 42U" :D

[con-f-use]

To anyone watching this: If you take a metal saw to your case, make sure to blow the dust out afterwards. Diligently! I know people who killed very expensive hardware through a short made with metal shavings. Fans will suck that stuff in and potentially blow it everywhere. Vacuuming with sensitive components inside might not be good idea, either, because electrostatic discharge. So if you have to vacuum, do it in the empty case or take the small risk, otherwise compressed air is less risky option.

[DoozyBytes]

As a sysadmin, I loved this! Great to see people adapt entreprise gear for home use.

[DavesGarage]

Amazon sells short 6" extension cords that you can use to move the power bricks out and away from the power strip, thereby making each outlet available.

[MrGonzJay]

8:12 Just for anyone that is thinking of taking this advise; keystones need the same exact punch down tool to terminate them properly. What I will say is that keystone patch panels are nice because they are very modular and you can get keystones for HDMI, USB, ect. not just ethernet.

[saptarshikundu]

Loved it! Amazing to see how you adapted enterprise hardware, made decisions based on your requirements and adapted it for your use case (like the one with the PSU and fans for quieter operation and so on)! Keep it up!

[PoeLemic]

Thanks for walking us through your HomeLab. I'm working on creating my own, so it's nice to see what others have done. Makes me know that better is possible.

[Lonnie.G]

I have a couple of old Supermicro chassis I might have to modify like this! Nice! Definitely get a UPS next though — it’s worth it to allow your server to gracefully shutdown during an outage and also allows you to monitor power usage from it. I have mine feeding an influx db and display through grafana to track daily costs and yearly projections for energy expenses.

[davocc]

I have built small enclosures from Ikea sideboard cabinets for systems - one was in a mate's living room, he wanted to keep all of his kit out of the way and out of sight. He has two servers, a Pi with drives hanging off it, power boards, cabling, cable modem, router and a tertiary remote workstation that runs headless.
We put together a small cabinet (this is a sideboard so about waist height) and we left the back off entirely. The idea was to dissipate heat - the back is up against the wall with just enough gap to let heat out and cables run up to a TV, etc. The doors on the front close easily.
Overall solution - works a TREAT. Super-cheap, wildly civilises the room and cuts down noise quite a bit. Also heat is not a problem (he's in the sub-tropics and it is frequently mid to high 30ss in there, haven't had a single issue even with all systems fully on).
Also found that dust wasn't an issue either - as most case suck air from front to back it tended not to be able to get much in dust-wise through the front doors.
The whole thing is on little legs so its' off the ground by perhaps six inches (standard for the cabinet). Indeed the only mods we made to the cabinet were leaving the back off (just not installing it when putting it together, it wasn't structurally required) and also some screws inside on one side to mount a power board up for neatness.

I personally do this though I was stupid and put the back on mine (I'm in the UK so it's a bit cooler than the other setup). I want to remove the back on mine - I have three servers (2x HP Microservers and a mITX Intel Zeon mini server) as well as a hardware intel based firewall, a Pi with a stack of drives, switches, messy cabling and even a laptop in a dock missing its screen and keyboard that I use as a processing box (wake it with WOL packet and use it to chomp on files, it's running Debian and it's making use of bits of a T420 I had lying around). Because of the back my heat situation isn't as good but the noise and dust situation is brilliant; it's hard to hear the servers except when I wake them, they're storage tanks so they're powered off most of the time.

I think this solution idea is very much worthy of a look for anyone who has systems, switches, cables, power boards, SBCs, you name it - floating around and cluttering a room while producing noise and sucking in dust.

[roccociccone]

Since I’m also in the process of moving my home lab to a rack this video was extremely helpful.

[thezebiano]

The timing on this video couldn't have been better for me, my home server just broke. Thanks for all the information!

[KeithHeinrich]

Love the server build. I repurposed a Juniper WXC chassis long ago in the same way, junk out, power reduction splitter for the fan to shut it up, pico power supply in, rotating drives out, SSD in. It was built on a supermicro motherboard which was the only thing saved. Cool quiet, low power. 👌

All the cool kids are doing unifi, pffft. There are equally serviceable and far more inexpensive not to mention interesting options and you seem to be all over that.

Other worthwhile hacks, keystones as you said and rack studs rather than cage nuts.

[devans]

I literally spent over 10 hours yesterday searching for info to get a 3U ATX hot-swap rackmount case for a build I am planning. I can't understand why these are so hard to come by. Thanks for your video. Back to my depressing search.

[peterbalogh]

:-D
Mate, server integrator here, and it does not hurt! On the contrary! In work I don't really care about noise, and rarely we build our servers. Warranty and support are king. But I still need my home server, for which I accept no noise. I am in the process of selling all tech I have, and start from scratch again. Jepp. ;-) Thanks again!

[saulo]

One of the best channels on YouTube and I watch a lot of this niche.

[dirtybrokkoli]

Next video better gonna be called: "How i sold my soul to the energy market to keep my server rack running" :D

[pkt]

Nice video. Homelabing a rack in a compact space can be difficult. My old house had some large unfinished spaces in the basement so a 42U rack was no problem. I decided I wanted to use network rack in a closet for the new house. That has limited cases choices as I have just under 17" deep of space. I also wanted 2 optical drives. So I have a non-optimal case. When Zen4 comes out I will probably move my 5900x from my desktop to the ASrock Rack x570 board in the server and hopefully moving to a better case.

[Plexdet]

I have been wanting to build a home server like this for a while. Glad it isn’t as crazy an idea as i thought.

[maxshanly]

Thank you for another great video, Wolfgang!

[TheAntibyte]

I'd look at making a custom 3d printed bracket to adapt the current mounting posts to 120mm sizing.