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.

My fist rack, made of wood!

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.

The rack box project

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) 🙂

Finally a proper rack, in a server room

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.

Rack with my computer, and 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.

Rack with one server, my workstation, and a UPS

I got a monitored PDU and a Qnap NAS, which I returned and replaced with Synology.

Rack with one server, NAS, and a UPS

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.

Rack with multiple computers, NAS, and a UPS

Now it was finally starting to look like something, and I wrote a blog post about it 👍

Proper homelab rack

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!

HP enterprice server

Yet another identical server case was mounted — don’t remember the rationale behind that. But it looked cool 😎

Rack with many computers

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.

Still a rack with computers and stuff

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 🤘

A rack with different server cases now

In 2020 it was time to take most of the gear out, and get the rack moved to our new house.

Racky ready for travel

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.

Sad looking rack in new home office

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 😞

Still pretty sad looking rack

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 🤷

Homelab rack, now with stuff

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…

Homelab rack, and patch panel, in my home office

…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 🙂

Homelab rack with plenty of SFF servers

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 👇

Still a homelab rack with servers and stuff

And this is what the rack looks like today. But this is only temporary, as I have some upcoming homelab projects in the making 🙂

Current state of the homelab rack

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 🖖