I built a rack out of wood in 2004 — it was at home, and a lab, of sorts, so I guess that makes it a homelab 🙂
Let’s take a trip down memory lane and look at 20 years’ worth of homelabbing ❤️
Table of contents
2004
Yeah — like I said; my first rack was weird, and made of wood! It did some home room automation stuff, and had blinkenlights.
2005-2010
When I moved out and into an apartment, the home automation stuff kind of took off. I made so many micro controller modules that I have lost count…
I put them all inside a rack cabinet, and called it The rack box project. Some modules even had serial communication, using my own protocol syntax — SIOS.
2010-2012
In 2010 I bought a house, and suddenly I had a server room. I got the rack for free from a friend, finally a proper rack — it was an old audio rack from a school. I still have, and use, this rack today (but the glass door had to go) 🙂
2015-2017
Then followed a few years renting an apartment with my girlfriend, now wife, and suddenly becoming a dad of twins. The homelabbing was put on hold.
In 2014 be bought a house again, and a after settling in — my old friend the rack was back in business ❤️
But only as a practical place to put my workstation, and some other stuff.
Fun fact; the Thermaltake case is the same as in the cover photo, taken 11 years earlier 🙂
2017-2020
In 2017, after setting up my first server, I was pretty much hooked — and my homelab adventure began.
I got a monitored PDU and a Qnap NAS, which I returned and replaced with Synology.
I bought two more rack cases, identical to the one I already had. My workstation was moved into one of them and the other remained empty, for now.
Now it was finally starting to look like something, and I wrote a blog post about it 👍
I briefly experimented with some enterprise gear. And my briefly I mean, bought it, took it home, turned it on, turned it back off and sold it. It was way to loud!
Yet another identical server case was mounted — don’t remember the rationale behind that. But it looked cool 😎
One case was taken back out… I simply didn’t use it. I installed three 120mm fans at the top, to cool down my Unifi switches. This kept them quiet by preventing the internal fans from starting.
The fans were eventually taken out, and I started replacing the server cases. Turns out buying only identical server cases is kind of stupid 🤷 Also — front disk bays FTW 🤘
In 2020 it was time to take most of the gear out, and get the rack moved to our new house.
2020-2024
After getting the 59.5 cm wide rack through the 60 cm basement door, and down the basement stairs — it was now located in my new home office, where it still stands to this day.
Wi-Fi and internet was a priority, so that got up and running within a few days. With 4G, which was all we had at the time 😞
About a week later, the servers were in place. But getting the services up took some time, and wasn’t really a priority at that time. Turns out there is a shitload of things that needs to be done when moving houses 🤷
Fast forward about half a year, and everything was up and running — even the fiber and patch panel. My workstation was moved into a regular desktop case, I sold the old server case and bought a new one, and installed it in the rack…
…then moved an existing server into it, and sold the old one again. I have bought, replaced, and sold so many cases over the years 🤷
I also found out that SFF machines make pretty good servers, are usually quite cheap, and doesn’t take up a lot of space 🙂
Some cleanup was required, and I learned that stacking servers on top of each other makes maintenance more painful.
This is pretty much how the rack has stayed for a few years now, until I recently started replacing and moving things around 👇
And this is what the rack looks like today. But this is only temporary, as I have some upcoming homelab projects in the making 🙂
The end
If you’d like to know what my homelab looks like now — I try to keep this page up to date, with varying degrees of success.
Thank you for joining me on this trip down memory lane 🖖