“Project Mini Rack” Wants Make Your Mini-Homelab a Reality
upstart writes:
Wiki-style guide compiles all the pieces and potential of a rack you can carry:
I have one standard rack appliance in my home: a Unifi Dream Machine Pro. It is mounted horizontally in a coat closet, putting it close to my home's fiber input and also incidentally keeping our jackets gently warm. I can fit juuuuuust about one more standard rack-size device in there (maybe a rack-mount UPS?) before I have to choose between outer-wear and overly ambitious networking. Were I starting over, I might think a bit more about scalability.
Along those lines, technologist and YouTube maker Jeff Geerling has launched the Project Mini Rack page for folks who have similarly server-sized ambitions, coupled with a lack of square footage. "I mean, if you want to cosplay as a sysadmin, you need a rack, right?" Geerling says in the announcement video. It's a keen launching point for a new "homelab" or "minilab" project, also known as bringing the networking and hardware challenges of a commercial network deployment into your home for "fun."
It's a good time fall into the compact computing space. As Geerling notes in a blog post announcing the project, there's a whole lot of small-form-factor PCs on the market. You can couple them with single-board computers, power-over-Ethernet devices, and network-accessible solid state drives that allow you to stuff a whole lab into a cube you can carry around in your hands.
[...] "The community feedback around Project Mini Rack has been great so far," Geerling wrote in an email to Ars. The 3D-printed links and suggestions have been showing up steadily since he started committing to the page in earnest in mid-January. He's particularly excited to see that a "LACK rack," or using IKEA shelving for budget rack mounting, can be downscaled to mini-rack size with an Edet cabinet. "It's like someone at IKEA is a Homelab enthusiast," says Geerling.
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