I have a small server that acts as my homelab/selfhosted server at home and for my internal network. It’s slowly grown as I’ve added bits and pieces to it, and it became an un-maintainable mess of wires and bits strewn all over.
So I decided to clean it up a bit.
First was to order a small rolling cart off Amazon.
The plan is to put all the components on the cart with a minimal number of connections “outside” the cart, so it can be moved out of the corner it’s in for cleaning or maintenance.
I cut and mounted a board of MDF onto the back. On here is mounted the two UPS devices I use for battery backup on the server itself and the network equipment.
The main UPS box (on the left) powers just the server and has enough power to keep it on about 20 minutes (long enough to survive the brown-outs we get out here)
To the right of the main UPS is a smaller UPS dedicated to the network equipment. I haven’t properly stress-tested it, but it should have enough power to keep my internet functioning for 3-4 hours.
On the top of of the cart I mounted the internet modem, switch, the mirrored Pi-Holes, and my Deco mesh wifi adapter.
On the lower portion of the cart is the primary server itself, an old Dell XPS desktop unit with some extra RAM (32gb), and two RAID arrays, one a 16tb of hard drives, and another of 1tb SSDs for faster/frequent read/write stuff.
Next to the main server is a thin client running Home Assistant, and I swear I’ll actually set something up with it some day.
All in all the whole cart turned out exactly as I’d like, it’s still a mess of wires, but it’s far more manageable and being able to remove the whole “unit” to work on it is infinitely easier to deal with than the previous mess.
The next step will probably be to upgrade to a proper (albeit small) server rack, perhaps mounted out in the garage and paired with networking the whole house…. A project for another day!