Home Nerd-Station Setup for Servers
Thought we’d get off the software and virtualization track a little with this post. I hope you don’t mind.
Below is a photo of the rack setup for my home-office here. Notice that the rack is a steel rack on wheels, like you may see at a bakery or in restaurant storage areas. There are 5 cables that leave the rack. Everything else is connected on the rack itself. Those external connections have plenty of slack.
When I need to work on connections from the back, I’ll swing the entire rack out for easy access.
The keep the noise level low, the lowest rack has some carpet. It is amazing how much this helps reduce vibration noise. Simply amazing. Before the carpet, it was tough to work in this room.
There is other equipment not pictured (storage, routers, computers, portable devices) on the network too. Nothing too exotic or expensive. Most of that other stuff is 4+ yrs old. Heck, most of the stuff shown in the photo is over 4 yrs old too.
I hope the image resizing and optimization (1.4MB to 54KB) isn’t too bad.
Rack Contents from the top shelf, left to right.
There are 4 shelves.
Forth Shelf – The Top
- Motorola Cable Modem – DOCSIS 2 – Personal
- Cable Modem – DOCSIS 3 – Work (owned by ISP)
- Linksys WiFi Router – Personal
Third Shelf
- Logitech 5.1 THX rear-left speaker
- Samsung Laser Printer – ML-1740
- Core2 Duo E6600 system (unpowered last 12 months)
- HD Homerun HDHR3 – Networked ClearQAM TV Dual Tuner
- Handytone HD-502 ATA – VoIP
- Buffalo WiFi Router – Business
Second Shelf
- Power strip
- Brother All-in-One inkjet MFC-240c – no ink added in years
- UPS – 1500VA
- Power strip
- D-Link 8-port 10/100/1000 unmanaged switch
- TrendNet 8-port 10/100/1000 green unmanaged switch (not in photo)
- 4-port KVM (keyboard, video, mouse) – all VGA and PS2 connectors
First Shelf
- 4×320G HDD external disk array (JBOD) – approx 1TB in RAID5. Infiniband connected – Build Your Own Array
- Core i5-750 KVM and Storage Server – Server Build Articles
- Thermaltake BlacX dual dock connected HDDs (500GB and 1.5TB)
- UPS – 900VA
- C2D E8400 Xen Server
- C2E QX9xxx ESXi Server – VMware ESXi will not run on any of the other systems here.
There are a few spare HDDs sitting on top of the servers. Those are 80GB, 200GB and 300GB. There are many 300GB IDE drives laying around here.
Wood Storage
This holds records, software, DVDs, CDROMs, and a few games. On top are an old Uniden 8-handset phone system (not DECT) which is connected to the VoIP-ATA (model not available anymore) and a Snom 82x VoIP business-class SIP phone. By now, everyone should know that DECT was hacked.
Doesn’t everyone need a Snom? I won this phone at an Asterisk UG meeting.
Why don’t you have Server-class hardware?
- Servers are expensive and require expensive components (ECC RAM), SAS HDDs, etc.
- Servers are noisy and not suitable for a home.
- Servers have less efficient power supplies. This may not be true anymore.
- I already had desktop cases.
Why No Business-class network devices?
- Cost. Running a virtual router inside a VM can accomplish almost everything that hardware routers can.
- I do have another router device running IPCop that isn’t pictured. It is a pizza box (only 12 Watts) with a Via C7 CPU. The other, more famous, router distros were attempted, but didn’t like this hardware.
Ethernet Cables?
I use CAT6 for almost everything on the rack. It isn’t worth the hassle to me to not use CAT6. There are 3 very long CAT5e cables that connect to other equipment in this and other rooms in trial setups. I.e. they aren’t ready to get put on the rack.
Why Two Printers?
I always found around April 15th that the ink in whatever inkjet I owned was dry. That was $35/yr to print about 50 pages. Around 2002, I decided to get a laser printer, which still works perfectly. It is on the 3rd $35 toner cartridge. The print is beautiful and cheap. It is connected to a Linux server and shares the printer on the network with drivers or will accept any PDF to be printed.
The All-in-One was purchased when I needed a fax machine for business reasons. Faxing works over the VoIP service I use. Scanning works perfectly with the sheet feeder under Linux using gscantopdf.
WiFi Coverage?
There are lots of wifi radios around here between my 2 and all the neighbors. We’re still on 802.11g. N isn’t fast enough to replace the wired GigE, so why bother? A few devices are still “G” here, so even with a few “N” devices, it isn’t worth it for us. One router runs Tomato and the other runs DD-WRT.
Messy Cables
The back and front has slightly messy cables. In professional environments, I’ve seen exquisitely neat and tight cabling. I’ve also seen servers be forced into a failover because the console cables where too tidy, tight and came lose.
It is easy enough to follow the cables for these few machines that having neat cables isn’t worth the effort.
Assorted Cables Hanging Around?
The upper left hand corner of the rack is where I hang different cables. Power, USB, SATA, eSATA converters, audio, and video.
UPS for Everything?
Everything on the rack except the printers are on the battery side of the UPSes. When I first moved into this house, we had brown-outs every Saturday morning due to huge amounts of construction in the area. The electric company quickly beefed up the infrastructure and those all stopped around 10 yrs ago, but I’ve gotten into the UPS habit. Our utilities are below ground here too, so any disruption of service happens on a main road or due to a back-hoe accident these days. Still, the UPSes will beep when the input power isn’t as expected. Those conditions happen a few times every quarter. Lightning strikes will cause short outages – usually less than 10 seconds. Still, having that equipment on UPSes and surge protection ($15K warranty) does let me sleep a little better at night.
The 900VA UPS was purchased for less than $70 on a fantastic sale. The 1500VA was also purchased on an incredible deal for less than $70. I have 2 other APC 900VA UPSes and found that replacing the batteries was usually not cost effective for a home user.
I constantly watch Slickdeals for UPS deals. The units in the photo are at least 3 yrs old, so the batteries should be wearing out any time.
Rack Costs?
The rack was $70 at Costco or Sams many years ago. I don’t recall exactly. Walmart has something very similar for $180. When compared to $2K for a server rack system with shelves, etc, this seems much more cost effective and flexible for home needs. I’ve seen them at half-height for less. A brother-in-law is happy with that shorter setup.
I hope this look at the home-office setup gives you some ideas to make your nerd-station more organized and efficient.
