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Building Rackmount Cabinet for Home Use?
Timothy M. Schumann asks: "I am trying to build a small rack mount cabinet for my family to help with the clutter of our home network. I don't want to purchase a rack or cabinet pre-manufactured; I would like to build my own. However, I have been unable to find a list of physical specifications that racks and cabinets must conform to when built, so I was wondering if any Slashdot readers could help me find such information? Just for a frame of reference, I'm looking for something along the same detail level as the BTX form factor specs that can be found here. Any input on cost effective hardware choices for rack mountable UPSs, switches and/or cases is also welcome." This topic was originally discussed some two years ago, and while there was some useful information was presented, the basic question wasn't really answered. If you were going to try and build a custom rackmount enclosure for yourself (or someone else), how would you go about doing it?
I have a small area for doing a rackmount in. I do not need 60 1u boxes. Just enough room for about 5 2U (gives room for air). By having the material, it would be possible to build a small one that fits the enclosure.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Not why custom build a cabinet, but why, if you are _custom_ building a cabinet would you care about "physical specifications that racks and cabinets must conform to"? I find this confusing. Isn't the point just to build what you need for the equipment you have??? But I could be wrong...I have a history of missing the point of these things.
Some day you are going to want to move. Buy an Anvil or equivalent case on eBay with rack rails pre-installed, and wheels.
I went to IKEA and bought a cheap-o entertainment cabinet. Nice black finish, smoke glass door on the front, and cheaper than I could have bought the parts for to build my own.
I never installed the castors, and as that puts the bottom right on the floor it easily handles the weight of my large UPS. The only problem is no rails, but I've put everything on shelves... it's only for home, after all.
Try here for reasonably-priced rackmount rails. They aren't really quite proper for computers, though.
I also have a catalog from Hammond Manufacturing which sells racks piece-by-piece, including rail sets. Their catalog shows a lot of detailed schematics for their racks, as well. You can get a catalog free from their web site.
I use a couple old HP half-height racks (really using only 1 right now, 1 more sitting around). They aren't deep enough for proper cases, though, so I use shallow cases for now.
I'm planning to do the same thing as you, at some point. I've considered some $300 racks off eBay and the normal $250 shipping, but I'd rather build a nice wood-exterior cabinet that would look good in the home. Besides, I need something that is closer to 'normal' specs than the racks I have now. Rack hardware: I'd stick to eBay. Shelves, blank panels, etc. are all much cheaper that way. I also bought a rackmount APC UPS--look for one WITHOUT batteries, and shop around online for replacements. You will pay less for shipping all around, and the batteries are usually crap anyway, unless it's a trustworthy seller who says they put new batteries in it. For cable management, I prefer a simple lacer bar, unless you really have a ton of equipment. Of course, if I had money, I'd get rails and cable management arms...but I was doing good to buy the rackmount cases, as the rest was (mostly) free for me. For rackmount computer cases, I've used Case Outlet for a while. They barely speak English, but they resale decent cases at decent prices. If you are using any kind of multi-drive enclosure or removeable drive racks, be sure to gett the DEEP cases! You can also try KRI Computer for rackmount equipment. I've never bought from them before, but I've heard good things about them, and they have good prices and a good selection. Welcome to the world of Ultimate Geekdom!
How you going to handle heat and air cirulation. I see some of these answers about closets and cabinets and can just feel the heat build up. Telco racks are cheap and offer lots of air circulation. Have deep servers that need front and back mounting then use two telco racks. We mounts Suns that way all the time. If telco racks are to tall they are easy to cut down, but there are also lots of accessories for them like shelves, keyboard drawers, cable management guides, and etc. Plus easy to take apart and move it necessary.
If you don't want a full relay rack/cabinet, lots of companies sell 1/2, 1/4 and 1/8 size rack/cabinets with or without wheels, doors, wall mount, etc.
Unless your time is worth next to nothing, it will be cheaper to buy.
And if you don't need a 19" rack, many shelving units do a fine job and look nicer in a home environment.
When I was in university I went to the monthly surplus sales racks were available pretty often and for low prices. I could have gotten racks for as low as $10 canadian. The old DEC ones looked pretty good too. I don't see why you should have to make racks.
The only problem with these is that all the pressure is on the bolts in front, there is not a good way to balance heavy devices like a full cabinet.
Also, these are not good for servers that might need to get worked on. This idea is great for routers, switches and other network equipment that just sits there.
This is basically what we did for our network devices, but not for servers.
Those relay rack are complete crap when it comes to housing anything that weighs more than a pound or two. My boss once ordered these thinking they were a great way to save money. So we have two full height relay racks housing a 2U power bar, terminal concentrator (4U), some modems (2U) and a switch (1U) while friggin' servers sit on the floor. Yeah, good move.
These things are good for telco and telco-type infrastructure. Other than that, they are garbage. Garbage!
And they use a different sized screw than everything else we have (10-32). It may be because they're Hubble, who knows.
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
It's worth remembering that steel or aluminum cases lose quite a lot of heat through the walls while wooden boxes are insulators, so commercial cases are more tolerant of poor thermal design.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
Your local telco store may help. You know, the place where they stock extra phone books, overpriced telephones, and try to sell you an overpriced cell phone plan. They sometimes have secondhand relay racks, or as I found, even full-sized server cabinets, for which they don't have a use. Ask for the person who buys commercial customer premises back office equipment.
I went to a bankruptcy auction and bought three Motorola telecomm cabinets for $1.50 (that's right, a dollar and a half). These are only about 60" high by 18" deep, so they're really just dressed up relay racks. I gave one to a client and kept the other two.
Adding rails to one of them was about $60. I ordered them through my local telephone company, because it was cheaper and better than buying angle iron, drilling holes, and threading them myself. I added wheels and some paint. My total expenditure was just over $100 per cabinet.
I also bought a used high-end server cabinet for a client from the local telco for about half the price of a new one.
Our local recycler has a division that deals with computer stuff. Anything computery they separate out and try to resell. The nice thing is, they sell it by the pound! I bought several rackmount cable management modules for about $20, less than the price of a single new one. They were just sitting in a pile on the ground. I cleaned them up, and they made a nice addition to my cheap server cabinet.
If you want to put your rack in a closet and maintain a reasonable temperature, you can buy a bathroom fan and thermostat for not much money. I think a nice quiet fan is about $75, but in a closet noise may not be an issue.
sigs, as if you care.
I went with a simple 19" post and 1x2U 5x4U chassis. Here is a page with some of the info. My Home Rack Now please be nice to my bandwidth slashdot :-(
Hello. I was lucky enough to come upon a used rack that a company was throwing away. I am now in the process of building a rackmount server. By far, the hardest part was finding a case that was inexpensive and had enough hard drive bays for my needs. After much searching, I finally found the Antec line of rackmount cases:
http://www.antec-inc.com/us/pro_rackmounts.html
I think these are fairly new, because when I first started looking, no one had stock. I got my 4U22ATX400 off of Newegg.com and I love it. It is really heavy duty and sturdy. Plus, it has drive bays up the wazzo. Finally, despite its low price ($188), it has the features of a much more expensive case.
If you're in the UK, Studiospares supply all the bits you need to bolt rack gear into your own housing, such as rack strips of various heights, nuts and bolts, and pre-made cases & flightcases by Buster Cases.
Note their directions to get the right width between the rackstrips:
Or you could go for a Designer Rack, even if just for ideas :)
I was lucky to save a server cabinet from the skip at work. At the risk of Slashdotting myself... it's here.
Co-operation beats competition
I purchased a wire shelving unit on wheels from the Container Store. I keep the rack in my closet. When I need to get to the wiring, the entire unit rolls out. Total cost was about $150 US.
Michael.
Linux : Mac
No, I'm totally serious! Get a small relay rack for cable management if you must, but chances are you don't have much/any rackmount hardware anyway, and racks are pretty expensive/unnecessary for home use. Most home-use routers and switches have screw mounts on them so you can hang them on the wall and run them with staples to wherever they have to go. If you've got your heart set on rackmount systems, buy a music rack. They're often smaller and cheaper, but they're still not "cheap." Generally, with networking stuff, if you only need one rack, you can usually do without any. The only time you NEED rackmount stuff is large installations, i.e. you'd need 50 or 100 racks.
Serial consoles are fine for some purposes.
You're not going to get many people to ditch the framebuffer on thier desktop machine, though.
Try to think in 1980's terms, at least. Your ASR-33 is leaking oil on the linoleum again.
A Good Intro to NetBS
actually, for those of us in the Northeast, it would be cool to vent it out to an ajoining room to get some of that heat.
Same thing up here in frigid Ottawa, Canada.
My servers and my main workstation are in the furnace room, adjacent to a cold air return duct on my forced-air furnace. Their heat is dragged out of the furnace room and distributed throughout the house.
I'm actually considering getting together about 30 computers to heat the house this winter. Given my furnace's estimated 70% efficiency and the cost of electricity ($0.043/kWh) and oil ($0.47/L), it's cheaper. I also calculated the heat output per unit of each fuel. I could just use baseboard heaters, but the electricity may as well do something useful (distributed clients?) on its way to becoming heat.
While my main workstation is in the furnace room, my home office is in an adjoining room. I simply put a small hole in the wall for the VGA, audio, keyboard, mouse and Palm cables. It's effectively silent in here now.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
That's exactly what I did. I got the quietist bathroom fan I could afford, and an old electric base board thermostat. I took the thermostat and inverted the temperature element so it would come on when it got hot instead of cold. After a little fiddling with the setting I got it to come on at about 90 degrees Fahrenheit. On average the fan only runs about 10 minutes every hour, and keeps the closet temperature just fine. Total cost, about $65 US (not including the tools I already had). The only downside I can find to the set up is administrating the two servers in the closet. Most of the time I can ssh into either box, but if something goes wrong and I have to hook up a monitor it's a real pain. Other than that it's great.
I've mounted some amazingly heavy hardware in aluminum racks, including Cisco's (physically) largest switches and some nice deep UPSes. I didn't strip any screws out. I suspect that you put a fine threaded screw into a coarse threaded hole. Most racks meant for computer shit have a finely threaded hole, and the relay racks have a coarse pitch. I'm sure you know this, and I'm sure you're saying "no I didn't!" right now, but I don't believe you, because I've mounted all kinds of heavy stuff, including Matrix 3000 batteries on rack shelves.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
In areas near military bases you may find a great government store called the Defense Reutilization and Marketing Office. You can bid on all kinds of used DoD stuff, including rack cabinets and hardware. I have found all-metal full-featured faraday-shielded dustproof 6' tall rack cabinets, 5' long power strips, etc. I also bought an old radar video converter just to cannibalize the 4U rackmount case. If you are with a charitable org like the Boy Scouts, you get first dibs.