Late 2018 I finally pulled the trigger and bought a Unifi 16XG 10GbE switch, I’ve wanted one for a long time. When I plugged it in for the first time, I realized it was pretty loud… It was the loudest thing in my rack — bummer.

The homelab is in my home office, man-cave, workshop — which is in the basement. The room is pretty well insulated, and heat generated here, mostly by the homelab, stays here. I needed a way to keep the temperature down in the hot summer months and during the cold winters. Well — this is it!

I’ve got a tiny computer lab at home; a 29U rack with servers, UPS, ATS, PDU, 10 Gbit networking, OPNsense, and all the cool stuff.

I used to smoke cigars in my home office, and the ventilation was pretty much set up for that. My duct fan was connected to an active carbon filter in the ceiling, to make sure the smoke would not be noticeable outside and leak back in when the bedroom windows were open in the summer months. That happened once, and the girlfriend did not approve.

Anyway; after I got the homelab properly set up, smoking cigars in the office just didn’t feel right… All that smoke drawn into the servers, heat-sinks, filters and so on. Never mind the lungs, think of the servers! So it was time to rebuild the exhaust ventilation system to better suit my new needs.

I first got the server rack back in 2011. At the time I lived alone in a house; I had a UPS, single server, a few cheap NAS’ and a switch in it. When I met my girlfriend, and we moved together about two years later the rack went into storage. And it stayed in storage until we bought our house late 2014, where we currently live. The rack was put to use in my home office in the basement, but not really utilized much. It’s only lately, and after I found /r/homelab, that the rack was truly put to use in my current homelab.