At my old house, instead of buying a TV cabinet, I opted to buy a 32RU server cabinet. I thought it was a good idea. Things would be dust free, cooled well, and super organised, with a few shelves. I never envisioned my server rack becoming exactly that, a server rack.
Then it began slowly. I wanted a way to have my media files viewable around the house. Then I self-hosted my photography website for a little while, using wordpress, a reverse proxy, and a database. Then extended downtime saw me stop doing that. I hosted a few bots that did bits and pieces.
Now that I have moved house, started running a hive witness node, and have a much larger home network, the rack has proven to be a great purchase.
Here's what is in mine, from top to bottom, then back to top.
At the top, there's a patch panel. Two cables come in from the garage, where the network end point is located. That's 23 and 24 on the patch panel. The purple cables lead to other rooms of the house, into the switch. They're purple because I thought purple was cool. The White cable then leads to the POE switch which handles the doorbell.
The rest of the blue cables are for the home security cameras.
This is just networking, before we get to some exciting stuff on the shelf below it. The silver box on the left is a minisforum minipc, with 8 cores, 16 threads, 64GB of ram, and will be running my primary Hive witness node. It runs proxmox, and will shortly be upgraded to have 2x 4TB nvme SSDs. Complete overkill, for the time being, but it will host two virtual machines, so that in the event of updates / forks, I can test in one environment, while the other stays live.
I am sure I will find other services to run on this box in time.
To the right of this is the network video recorder for the home security system, and above it, a POE switch, to ensure that the devices that need PoE, get PoE. Nothing super exciting, until you follow some cables back to the top of the server rack.
There's a monitor and a mouse that can be used to monitor the security system without a mobile app. On top of the rack also sits a myriad of other devices.
One of the white boxes controls the remote controlled shutters, which are programmed to (without the need of an external network or other source) to close the shutters when the temperature reaches a certain threshold.
The other box is a TP-Link Matter compatible smart home hub, which looks after a camera in the garage, temperature and humidity sensors, and door sensors which do things like turn on exhaust fans in the bathroom, via some relays installed behind the switches.
There's also a model of a Lexus LFA (the best sounding car ever made) and a Lara Croft figurine that a friend gave me as a gift.
We return now to the inside of the rack, where more exciting stuff happens.
You'll note that there's a bunch of empty space between the top of the rack and this lower shelf. That is for future expandability. Right now, my wife's old computer, caseless, sits ontop of its motherboard box, waiting for me to find a ewaste pc case to put it in. It will then join with the machines below it.
There's three spare hard disks, waiting to be deployed in the event of a failure - be that in the security camera system, or the QNAP NAS that sits on the extreme right of the shelf. The QNAP has a simple, single function. Take some of the most important file shares from the server below it (more on that soon) - archive it, and mirror it to second drive.
Then, every evening, it backs up to OneDrive, in an encrypted file format.
To many, the most exciting one is the black Silverstone box. It runs a number of services. It has about 80TB of storage, 128gb of RAM, and a 10 core / 20 thread CPU. This machine uses unraid as its operating system.
I'm running the following on it (among other things)
- Jellyfin
- Ubuntu VM (which runs a backup witness hive node)
- File Acquisition
- Several Network shares (most notably for my photography)
- Proxmox node backup storage
- Unmaniac (To transcode files to x265)
- Vikunja (a better, self hosted trello) - thanks
for getting me onto this!
- Home Assistant running various automations
- Tailscale!
- Some Databases for me, being a data nerd
- ... and more.
The final shelf is the most boring, but probably the most important one. It is the powerhouse of the rack. (And it isn't boxes storing mitochondria) this is where the uninterruptible power supplies live. They keep it going if the power goes out. There's also a whole of house battery backing up the whole thing.
I would love to have a rack mounted UPS, but they're prohibitively expensive, and kind of not all that important, given the fact that the home battery provides back up power anyway. Except for when, like I did recently, not have things plugged into the correct, protected circuits. That's fixed now.
My main goal is to get a little bit more storage space (some WD Red Pro 26TB drives), and to slowly migrate things over to the shiny new 4TB nvme drives that arrived earlier in the week, for my photography and database tasks.
That concludes my tiny little homelab tour.
If you think this is cool, so do I. It all runs well. I am constantly amazed at how much more computers can do for you once you start to look at them as appliances that do things for you, instead of things you do things on.