LackRack: IKEA's cheapest table is perfectly sized to rackmount computers (2020) | Hacker News Reader

LackRack: IKEA's cheapest table is perfectly sized to rackmount computers (2020)

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347 pointsbluehatbrit238 comments

I have been really happy with the HEJNE shelf as a rack.

Here are some 2U's here at home: https://s3.whalesalad.com/lab/rack.jpg

The shelf: https://www.ikea.com/us/en/p/hejne-shelf-unit-softwood-s7903...

I keep seeing full height Dell racks for sale on FB marketplace in the $200 range but haven't encountered the right manic episode to actually go for it.

HEJNE is "ok" but really REALLY add the cross bracing, and perhaps even add plywood to one side.

I have a HEJNE that is just holding LEGO with cross bracing and it is visibly leaning.

I don't expect it to fall down but I'm also not loading thousands of pounds into it.

I was wondering about this, I had a bunch of these screwed in together as a cheap kitchen cabinet when I was younger. They can be get pretty wobbly even with the braces.

I have a dozen of these tied together, with the cross bracing, into an L in my basement. The whole unit has a few ties to the cinderblock wall behind it. That arrangement adds a good bit of stability. I agree that a on their own or in small numbers they’re not very stable.

It's not the rack that's the problem, it's the fans. Most industrial gear requires a ton of airflow and the noise is something like having a model jet engine sitting in your closet. This from someone who actually did go for it and later recanted.

Both of these R720's are barely audible when you are standing right next to them. They are in my basement furnace room too, so I literally cannot hear them anywhere else in the house.

Is that running things on them full bore? I tried a server case with a bunch of 1080's in it for some image processing but the noise levels were off the scale even though they were fairly large diameter fans. Not R720's though, so larger fans. Interesting datapoint!

The worst offenders were the 1U units, such as routers and switches, and a bunch of Supermicro 1U servers.

Correct answer here, 1U fans are so small they have to spin at stupid RPMs to move a half decent volume of air.

I always think it'd be cool to have a server rack in my apartment until I powered up a server in my apartment and it far eclipsed the noise produced by the air conditioning from anywhere in the living space.

Doesn't have to be like that though. I've got a rack next to my desk and it's fine noise wise, though less fun during summer (no AC here)

Excellent point. I have a Lack Rack in my office closet, but the mounted device (Fortinet 100D) was replaced with a fanless firewall instead. The Fortigate is still there, but off, and the table still holds my laser printer up.

I remember doing that years ago when I was younger... so I tried using a stereo rack system. Which immediately heated up and set off in-machine alarms.

My eventual solution was to put the machines under the sink in the bathroom and run a cables through the wall to the bedroom :)

I hope that sink never developed a leak…

This is a good point for why an actual rack is a bad thing for some use cases in the home. When moving into my current house an AV Geek neighbor setup a home theater type setup with the receiver, amp, in house audio (VSSL) amp, and other devices in a large high quality rack that I spent too much money on.

None of this uses a lot of power or makes a bunch of heat. The receiver tops out at 140W total RMS over seven channels and the VSSL is about 20 per channel. The rack adds an additional 75mm to each side of the rack and 120mm to the front and back. It takes up a lot of room in its closet and I’d be happier with more space to move around it.

LACKs are a bit too flimsy and small for the setup I want to replace. The parent’s shelving unit example looks like a great replacement, especially since I want to store things in that closet on shelves anyway.

Yep. Used to run two gargantuan floor-to-ceiling racks, but they're just impractical. Over time, hardware gets smaller and smaller, and rack-mount gear is less and less common, mercifully. I have 12U of rack space left in my desk for fanless devices such as AD/DA convertors and compressors, 500 series, Eurorack etc. I would never want to go back to having huge racks, it's very impractical.

I have a full rack, all cooled, runs pretty quiet. It all just comes down to design. If you just stick in old random enterprise gear, you'll have a bad time.

A few years ago we obtained a full size rack (with some switches/firewall appliances included) for about 50£ delivered.

The guys who dropped it off outside our second floor office had a good laugh at our expense as we tried work out how to get the bastard thing up there via a narrow stairs.

We basically had to take it apart on the footpath, heft all the bits upstairs, then engage in the biggest 3D puzzle ever without any instructions.

Racks tend to be cheap if they are inconvenient. Offloading it to us delivered for 50£ was a lot cheaper than paying for it to be recycled.

I prefer the minimalism of a "vertical rack" which, for some reason, I tend to never see. If you don't have more than 6U or so of equipment, it's really the way to go because of its minimal profile and amazing load-bearing ability: it is load-bearing parallel to the direction of gravitational pull (vs regular rack cabinets where the load is perpendicular to the posts), and then that weight is all redirected towards the wall, so even the heaviest servers or whatnot that would normally sag unless it comes with rear-mountable rails for 4-post racks (which, for some reason, very few do) work amazingly well. I've bought a few of this StarTech one [0] over the years, but I've also seen people weld together a couple of metal struts to accomplish the same.

[0]: https://amzn.to/3QTmVee

I didn't know this was an official thing. Seems like it would work great in a lot of cases. But one of the main reasons I like racks is the ability to pull a server out on tracks and open it up to do maintenance, add hard drives, etc. I suppose you still could do that on this vertical setup, but only with one server with the top facing away from the wall.

Yup. I have my 1U switches, patch panels, and PDUs in the back, and my one 2U server in the front so it’s fairly easy to take down on the rare occasion I need to. The front drive bays minimize the need to do that very often, though.

Switches and routers sure- I've used it for things like that quite a bit- but I'd never put a server (even a 1U) in one. Ease of getting in and swapping parts is a huge factor.

Is there a good source for short-depth sliding rack rails, or is the DIY route (drawer slides) recommended?

I've never had luck with rails that weren't shipped with the device, but I know RackSolutions sells some universal shallow rails. I've never used them but I've seen them around.

How often are you doing that (vs using the drive bays up front), though? Anyway, I have a 4U with 1U devices like a switch, patch panel, and PDU in the back and then a 2U server in the front. You can just unscrew it and pull it out from that position (rather than having to pull it all the way out). I wouldn’t want to do it with more than one 2U server, though.

Isn’t it, in theory, bad for airflow? At least active cooled hardware would try to push hot air down against the hot air trying to raise upwards?

Good question. It’s fairly short depth and there is great airflow under it (not being constrained like in a cabinet) - I have the fans nuked in my (lightly loaded) switches for noise reasons and still have great temps with just ambient cooling.

Tracking-free link:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B001YHYVEY

you used to be able to say amzn.com/<id> like amzn.com/B001YHYVEY but that seems to have stopped working.

hmm... seems https://amzn.com/dp/B001YHYVEY works

Thanks. I just used the share feature from the app because I didn’t have a url to copy.

That's fine, but you can still cut the crap off the end of it.

They generate opaque short links now, so you would have to open the link in a new tab and manually scrape the resulting address. Scrolling horizontally while selecting text in a fixed-width text fields is a PITA on iOS.

You can simply edit it when posting it to HN.

Huh, vertical rack like that reminds me of immersion coolers for servers.

Example: https://www.grcooling.com/customer-successes/tacc/

Do you have a better link? I can’t understand anything from the promo pics they have on display and there’s no actual text.

Watch out: newer Lack Tables from Ikea are less sturdy than their older predecessors. IKEA has made them even lighter than before, particularly the legs are almost cave inside, so beware that server racks might be too heavy for it

wow -- how can that even be?

I have a five or six year old lack I just disassembled due to wobbly joints. The entire thing was made of cardboard + a few small particle-wood reinforced areas near the joints, and a hard thick veneer.

the veneer shell is doing 85% of the workload already. I can hardly fathom how a weaker version would even work as a table.

Would you say that it... lacks?

I think the “newer” LACK is the one you disassembled. Time flies, they cost-reduced it quite a number of years ago.

At garage sales sometimes you find older Lacks that have solid wood legs.

With the newer hollow-leg ones, I find that if you punch out the bottom of the legs, you can snugly fit 1.75" square dowel inside. (Though I've heard that the thickness of the material varies by color; I can only confirm that 1.75" is the correct size for black tables.)

I naively put an old LaCie 1U server under a Lack table 13 years ago, thinking it would be a great media server in my living room. I had no idea how loud rackmount fans were. It was obviously unusable for watching any kind of media.

2U is a lot quieter than 1U. Those little fans spin louder and put out higher frequency noise. Though probably still not quiet enough for a media room. I’ve got a ruckus 10g switch and a 2U server in my utility room and you can sleep nearby and can’t hear anything with the door closed.

What drives me nuts is power supply noise actually. I finally bit the bullet and got a Mac mini for my home office.

Modern rack servers at least spin down the fans when the system isn't heavily loaded, but it's still way too loud for a media room.

For those playing at home, buying a 2U or even 4U rack will on average be quieter (still sounds like a jet engine just after reboot until the SMC comes online).

> even 4U rack

Supermicro builds some workstations[0] which were quite quiet back in Xeon 5xxx days.

[0] https://www.supermicro.com/en/products/x11/systems/workstati... be sure to check for the 'quiet fans', not the 'heavy duty' ones!

Interestingly Supermicro has a line of, in their words, super-quiet fans they produced for their workstations. Not quite noctua, but better than most. You can take those same Sanyo fans in their plastic quick connect green cowlings and put them in an 847 rackmount chassis. They are a drop in replacement. And if you get the 1250 platinum PSU, those fans run far quieter than their silver & gold line. I've got a water cooled 847 4U server with a small rack of 847 4U 45 drive disc expanders and it is a constant background hum, rather than a small jet aircraft taxiing around the room when using the stock fans.

Most 4U cases use standard sized fans (in fact a standard PC tower is 4U wide) so you can replace them with e.g. Noctua fans that are a lot quieter.

I did this to a 6-fan 4u case and it went from loud to just loud when it needed to be, and boy did it move some air!

For all the effort (and money) put into making a media server as quiet as possible (which is still not silent), I think you're way further ahead to just not put the server in your living room. Instead, put it in the basement/closet/garage/utility room -- somewhere you won't hear it. Then, broadly speaking, you have three options:

A commercial box, like NVidia shield, Chromecast, Roku, Amazon Fire stick or AppleTV. This is by far the easiest as you get a remote, a "10 foot user interface" and they work with online services like Youtube, Netflix, etc. If you care about everything being open source software this obviously isn't a good option.

You can also DIY your own box on a Raspberry Pi. Be prepared to do lots of tinkering, though.

The other option is to get the media server's UI remotely. Long HDMI cable, HDMI-over-cat5 or wireless HDMI gets audio/video; some of those also do USB, or you can do wireless control if it's close enough. Almost as much tinkering as a Raspberry Pi, but could be cheaper if it's not far.

Another big benefit of the first two options is it scales to multiple clients, if you have more than one TV.

I can't recommend the long HDMI (or HDMI-over-CAT5, or long Thunderbolt) enough. The noise isolation you can achieve by doing so is unbeatable. Even moving anything short of a 1U server into a neighboring closet means no perceptible noise, so you're really buying yourself more flexibility such that you can use almost any computer without thinking about noise constraints.

Even more than that, I'll bet a lot of people who are connecting a media PC to their living room TV also have another PC somewhere in the house. With a long HDMI cable, you can connect an existing PC to the TV, thus saving the entire expense of a new PC. This is particularly interesting for gaming, since a good gaming PC is a lot more expensive than even some of the longest HDMI cables.

Until your mom is flipping channels and gets to see what you really do in the basement all night…

To add to the HDMI-over-CAT5 instead of long-run HDMI, I wanted to offer an anecdote: we tried doing HDMI with extenders at a previous MSP shop. We had random de-syncs. We were probably far past the 50ft spec for how long to run an HDMI cable and the extenders were unpowered (basically female-to-female boxes). HDMI-over-CAT5, however, handled the distance flawlessly without powered boosters in the middle.

I put a rack/cabinet in the laundry room, with a QNAP NAS in there, Plex server is running on the QNAP, then an Apple TV 4K connects to that and feeds the TV.

I like this better than trying to do some sort of long HDMI cable setup, because the HDMI ports on most NAS units out there get old rapidly, don't support HDR and high bitrates reliably, etc. This way, it doesn't matter if the server is brand-new and fast enough and all updated for the latest video standards. As long as it can push the data out fast enough via Ethernet, you're good. Updating an Apple TV every 3-5 years is a lot cheaper and easier than getting a new server every time. And a good NAS is a lot cheaper than a full-out server would be.

I have a similar setup myself. I use basically an older PC running Proxmox + openmediavault as my NAS (and a bunch of other things, including Plex). I currently have an NVidia Shield and 'Chromecast with Google TV' as clients, as well as a couple phones and tablets. It is pretty hands-off and my family can all use it just fine.

I'm content to replace the relatively cheap client boxes every few years. That said, I think I've had the Shield for over 5 years now and other than the original remote being bent in half (likely a jumping-on-the-couch-related failure) it's still going strong.

Also works great as a 3D printer enclosure https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2864118

My Biqu B1 is in a lack enclosure.

Lack is made out of super cheap particle board. Is it stable enough to sit the 3D printer on? I would assume it would add some errors to the printing process.

I'm not even sure I'd trust it to hold more than a single 1U server as depicted in the article, for that matter.

Adding more kit increases rigidity. A "full rack" would be a stack of servers on the floor, with the table keeping them stacked.

The least-stable arrangement would be a very heavy 1u device at the top.

I think you're severely underestimating the strength of particle board.

It works fine and lots of people do it, I have been using mine without issue for a few years now. It helps to put a concrete slab in it, but it's not necessary. The lack table does have a tendency to amplify the noise though.

Here is a guide by Prusa to build one for their printers: https://blog.prusa3d.com/mmu2s-printer-enclosure_30215/

Unsurprisingly, the same issues arise with precision scales/balances as do with printers. Having a big heavy base is useful!

I know of a few places that just procured literal blank marble gravestones as a "base" for their analytical scales at a cost far less than the usual mass-damper bases sold to labs.

It’s perfectly adequate for stability. People have suspended printers in midair with elastic cables, or printed upside down, and prints have come out fine. The printer frame is providing most of the rigidity in this case. Don’t get me wrong, people that place their printers on spring like things tend to get lower quality prints so there is a limit there.

The downside about the IKEA particleboard over hollow cardboard core is more about sound and resonance imo. It can act as a speaker for printer vibrations and amplify that sound in the same room or to the floor below it.

A popular “mod” is to place a concrete paver block on top of some isolation pad, typically made of rubber or sorbothane to increase the functional mass of the printer and lower the resonant frequencies created during printing.

I personally have two of those enclosures stacked, with a printer in each one.

Oh boy is this thread relevant to me.

I just bought a concrete paver and neoprene mat to put on top of my lack and I'm printing pieces for my lack enclosure on my ender 3 as I type this message.

One thing I'm not sure about is whether or not I should attach the printer directly to the concrete paver, and/or if I should take the rubber feet off of the printer as well.

If so how do I best attach it?

I have a 3-lack-stack for my printer, but no paver. It sways a bit when I print, but I haven't run into any major issues without it. I should get one. A foam mat was mandatory though; the hollow core lack turns the motor noise into a scream!

I'd just try the easy thing first and set the printer on the paver without attaching. See if that works before you go through the effort of attaching it

The motor noise can be totally eliminated with an upgrade main board from bigtreetech. https://biqu.equipment/search?filter.p.product_type=3D+Print...

They are drop in replacements for the existing board and are very affordable. I highly recommend them.

Not at all in my experience but apparently it's fine for everyone else

Yea, I'm a bit surprised by the responses. In the case of using it for a Prusa, I'm not sure I understand the idea of buying a $1,000 3D printer and then putting it on a $15 particle board stand.

I stacked 3 of them with a 3D printer. It can handle all of them running at the same time.

There has been a construction industry effort to standardize "structured wiring" panels for low-voltage (alarms, A/V, ethernet, wifi) wiring connections in homes, but it has not quite kept up with the rapid expansion of devices for home networking, including mixtures of consumer and repurposed enterprise equipment.

Tripp Lite has an elegant vertical, low-profile, 3U wall-mounted enclosure that fits over existing structured wiring panels, which can accommodate both rack-mountable gear and odd-sized items like modems and access points. Price is ~$500, comparable to 12U wall-mountable racks that ship fully assembled.

SRWF6UMOD specs, https://www.tripplite.com/smartrack-3u-low-profile-vertical-...

video review (2020) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6XcYbr0L4WY

It might be possible to build a low-cost DIY clone, with 1/4" pegboard for the odd-sized items and a StarTech vertical frame for the rack gear. Hammond perforated metal panels (1/8" holes for self-tapping screws) could also be repurposed, https://www.hammfg.com/electrical/products/accessories/appp

For comparison, there are structured wiring product lines from Leviton, https://www.leviton.com/en/products/residential/networking/s... and Legrand, https://www.legrand.us/solutions/structured-wiring, but they don't typically support a mixture of home and rack kit.

In the article linked at the end

> https://spuder.wordpress.com/2013/03/23/lack-rack/

you can read (emphasis by me):

"If you decide to make your own, pay attention to which size lack rack you get. IKEA strangely offers 2 slightly different sizes

22 inch

and

21 5/8 inch."

In my opinion the explanation for this is clear: 22 is a round number in inches and 21 5/8 inch is nearly a round number in centimeters (21,625 inch = 54,9275 cm ≈ 55 cm).

This reminds of the many recipes that convert from Fahrenheit to Celsius (and vice versa for that matter) and don't round off the numbers properly.

I'm not setting my oven to 176 degrees Celsius even if I could.

This non-rounded numbers make people think that there's something terribly important at being X degrees and not X+1, not realizing that the internal temps vary widely even when set specific.

I feel recipes have caused more people to avoid cooking than anything invented in the last 1000 years, heh.

With regard to recipes, I sometimes wonder if "round numbers" are causing us to miss out on more optimal recipes. Maybe that dish really would turn out better cooked at 176F, or with 1 and 7/16 cups of flour instead of 1.5.

I think you're only going to see that benefit if, as mentioned you have a super precise oven, or you're getting super precise ingredient quality every time.

Otherwise there's too many variables fluctuating every time to really attribute much to those tiny variations in the recipe.

They somewhat do - this is the "skill" in being a chef, knowing what ingredients to add/reduce to get the result you want.

Why the quotes around skill?

Grocer's quotes for emphasis.

When it comes to flour, I don't understand why the USA insists on measuring it by volume when the rest of the world does it by mass. The density of flour can vary widely depending on if it's packed at all, and scooping it often leads to voids in the bottom of the measuring cup that you likely won't see unless you're using a clear measuring cup.

When using flour or baking mixes, I convert to grams (1 cup all-purpose flour = 125 grams) and do it by mass to ensure it's the proper amount.

This is interesting! And makes total sense. I didn't know that the rest of the world (smartly) measures flour in terms of mass not volume. And your conversion factor is really helpful, thank you.

Every American kitchen has measuring cups, few have scales. And people learn that method and continue to use it (most people don't even know about zeroing a scale after you add each ingredient).

It may also be that US measuring cups are "more convenient" sizes than the equivalent metric ones would be.

For flour, they often specify "sifted" which removes some of the variability.

> Every American kitchen has measuring cups, few have scales.

There's no reason Americans can't buy scales.

I got mine for $15 at Costco 10+ years ago. You can still get them from Amazon or Walmart for less than that.

> It may also be that US measuring cups are "more convenient" sizes than the equivalent metric ones would be.

When measuring out flour, I don't use a measuring cup at all. I put a bowl on my scale, hit the Tare button to zero it out, then add whatever number of grams of flour I need to the bowl.

> For flour, they often specify "sifted" which removes some of the variability.

That's gotta be awkward to sift into a measuring cup.

The problem is recipe book authors want to sell to all Americans (especially that group that always buys recipe books but never actually uses them) and so they aim at the widest possible market.

And as a result, most Americans never get scales since their recipes don't call for them.

The reason is momentum. Switching to measuring flour by weight will require households to have both measuring cups and scales, require recipes to be rewritten, require cooks with an intuition based on volume to relearn the intuition based on weight. None of this is insurmountable, just like none of the reasons for switching from imperial to metric are insurmountable, but for people getting things done, it's not enough of an issue to worth making the switch, so this kind of switch would require an institution or coalition with enough clout to make the switch and pull everyone else along. For cooking, I don't believe such an institution or coalition exists.

Brings to mind a convo about coffee a few years back. A friend was quite surprised I owned a scale accurate to the tenth of a gram just for dosing coffee beans when I could just use a super accurate scoop instead. I left it at that, and didn’t go into how I account for humidity affecting grinder retention, etc.

It’s easier to use weight instead of volume if you want measurements more precise than a 1/4 cup.

Most home ovens struggle to hit the set point to within 25F for most of their internal volume. They also have large swings in temperature as cheap heating elements do not respond quickly.

You find temperatures that precise when they're for equipment that can hit it: a sous vide steak at 56º C is different from a sous vide steak at 58º C. It just makes no sense for an oven, which is a pretty blunt instrument.

neither your oven's thermostat or your measuring cups are precise enough for either of those examples to make any difference.

recipes routinely call for "1 large egg". think about the amount of variance that can be present in that measurement, and assume every other measurement can vary by the same amount.

Edit: Nope, just didn't scroll far enough. They also list the 22" on their site as well. But still, which size is best for mounting?

old: The IKEA website only lists the 21-5/8" version. Is 22" required for computer rack use?

Read the article https://spuder.wordpress.com/2013/03/23/lack-rack/

"The 21-5/8” racks are the exact dimensions of server equipment."

Thank you.

As someone who bought a used 42U cabinet and somehow got it into my basement where it will remain forever unless someone cuts it into pieces to remove it, I can see the appeal of this.

Bought a rack for my garage, but I forgot to measure it upright and diagonally because the entrance is way smaller, so it had to be tilted in.. cleared the ceiling with 2 centimetres haha.

The 4-post "telecom" racks are often disassembleable and can be made to work, but you probably want to floor-mount them.

What most people should be using at home is a "knock down" or "open frame" rack. The posts can be separated from the top and bottom for transport. I use a couple of these in my basement, fairly sturdy and I can move them when I need to: https://avproducts.mccannsystems.com/avcat/ctl11226/index.cf...

Another option, if all your equipment can fit in the depth of what's basically a switch rack, is to use a wall rack: https://www.amazon.com/StarTech-com-Bracket-Equipment-Mounti...

Most audio and networking equipment can fit in there, as well as some servers. Check on the servers to make sure they fit, though.

I had to use a 4-post rack and a chop saw and take ~4 inches off the top of the rack and then I had to assemble it in the basement vertically since it's so close to the ceiling, it's too tall to tilt! Figured that out the hard way.

https://share.icloud.com/photos/0cdcI0nzE1jyUF8mGNwdrnCTQ

I feel like everyone else is using a different Lack than I've seen at IKEA, they're made of flimsy fiberboard that feels like it's going to fall apart at any moment. I tried making a printer enclosure and gave up because it felt like it would collapse from a strong breeze. If you're going to put in all this work, you should probably use better materials from the beginning.

They are stronger than they look. keep in mind that all joints in a lack have no cross brace so the leg-surface joint is actually pretty strong.

The big thing is that a tight install of the legs and adding tension and mounting the hardware helps cross re-enforce them. The examples where people use a second lack top as the bottom are WAY more reenforced than one would expect, you probably could use it as a chair.

I had 3 of them stack on top of each other, all with 3D printer and power supply and filaments for more than 2 years. It is very strong and sturdy. It didn't shake or sag.

they're made from flimsy fiberboard, but if you actually crack one open you'll see that all the joints are reinforced with wooden blocking, and the flat surfaces are filled with corrugated material. they're light, and if you get any water past the exterior finishing they disintigrate. but they're deceptively strong as long as all the joints are screwed together tightly.

Given how many Lack tables I've seen fall apart without any sort of load, I would be very reluctant to try this, no matter how many people report it works for them. It's IKEA's cheapest table for a reason.

In my experience, even cheap IKEA stuff is pretty solid and well worth the cost as long as you treat it with care. Some stuff is garbage even if you're careful but I've never personally seen something from IKEA that isn't great if handled gently.

On trick is to add some glue when you are assembling the furniture.

the lack I used for my prusa was , over time, covered in printed gusset features and additional L-brackets to get rid of sway and movement within the table itself.

it looked god-awful but it was sturdy for years and years of production-quantity printing. It was only disassembled when the print lab got rebuilt.

so, in other words, I support your idea of modifying the construction of the lack wholeheartedly. The joint lines are one of the only 'strong-ish' elements on the entire table, and I think they'd take glue nicely.

The IVAR system is, in my book, absolute complete junk. I couldn't get it to even attempt to work correctly, it wobbled when it wasn't collapsing, and to make insult even worse, it was more expensive than actual industrial wire shelving.

Did you forget to add cross-braces [0]? Ivar has always been rock-solid for me.

[0] https://www.ikea.com/us/en/p/observatoer-cross-brace-galvani...

Even with cross bracing it had too much wobble, which would pull the short pins out of the cross board, and if you bumped a shelf it would hop out and then fall.

That sounds like you didn’t properly clip the shelves on (it takes a bit of force). In any case, that’s not how Ivars usually behave.

Yeah despite my complaints about LACK above I have had only good experiences with the IVAR stuff, made out of real wood.

In my experience, you get one move from IKEA furniture. By the time you've relocated it twice, whether across the room or across the country, it will become unstable and likely to fail.

If you are exceptionally careful and always have help moving anything of size, you may do better.

My dad was a cabinit maker so i have experienced "proper" cabinets as well as Ikea stuff.

You called it. Ikea furniture never seems to support disassembly / reassembly.

I've thrown out several sets of Ikea dressers and such which lasted ~5 years while the stuff my dad built is still in perfect working condition 22 years later.

As far as the Ikea rack idea is concerned, holding any sort of weight has always been the major failure with Ikea furniture. They sell bookshelves which cant hold books... Dressers with 1/4 "cardboard" bottoms which cant support the weight of clothing.

you get what you pay for.

My oldest Ikea unit is from 2007, it's moved 5 times since then, as solid now as the day I bought it, although that one is small enough to not have to dismantle.

I've got an ikea bed dismantled, moved, rebuilt 3 times no problem, and a bookcase with the same dismantle/rebuild process 4 times. My office desk is also on 4 moves over 10 years.

you can't really generalize that IMHO, they make both things that are easily damaged and stuff that can easily survive many moves.

Why? Do the legs shatter? That would be the only reason that your concern makes sense - adding 1 or more rigid metal bodies that connect to each leg seems like it would stabilize the structure.

Some years ago the legs used to be fully solid, now most of the legs are empty. So what you can do is get some wood sticks cut to the same size of the inside of the legs.

They don't hold up well to repeated side impacts or horizontal shearing. So kids jumping on it, shin kicks, or moving locations. They do well with the vertical forces if they're rarely moved.

I currently have two stacked Lacks acting as a cheap homemade server rack. I have 2x 4U ontop the bottom table (not floating as they're doing in the article), with an older colour laser printer and 21" monitor, KVM, etc. on the top table. Underneath I have 2x1500VA UPSes.

It's been that way for years and I've moved it a few times. I think if you've seen them fall apart without any load, they're either the much newer ones that have been completely hollowed out, or they've been used in a rougher setting than "servers sitting statically on them for years."

I know quite a few home lab users who swear by them. One person I know even has a full triple stack (which seems unsafe to me personally) with his networking gear on top of the servers.

The less advert laden site: https://wiki.eth0.nl/index.php/LackRack

Apologies, I run an adblocker so didn't see the ads on this page. Perhaps @dang could update it to point at that page instead?

Ok, we've changed to that from https://boingboing.net/2020/08/14/lack-rack-ikeas-cheapest-t.... Thanks!

The LACK has also been a staple of thrifty musicians for decades. As a student in the early 90s supporting myself playing clubs and bars, I had a quadraverb, mixer, compressor, and foldback amp bolted into a single, reasonably portable unit I could also rest a beer (or myself) on.

That looks a lot sturdier than Apple's iRack.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rw2nkoGLhrE

IKEA CORRAS Bedside Table FTW!

Photo of my newest CORRAS rack setup: https://www.neilvandyke.org/kubernetes/

Sadly, IKEA no longer makes the CORRAS. I used to have 6 of them, foolishly sold some when going minimal.

LACK is not a sturdy piece of furniture. I broke a leg off of one when I snubbed my foot on it; it came apart /at the table/, the whole corner section just came off.

Clearly it should be reinforced with a few 1U cross braces!

Not a bad idea, and I suspect it’s the MDF material coming undone over time due to moisture or something. I really did not hit the table hard at all!

Is this just a random coincidence? Is there some explainable reason why the dimension is perfect? Surely IKEA did not have this use in mind when originally designing this?

It's a round number of inches that happens to be right, possibly because "this size is good for a table" is what probably went through the engineer who decided what size a rackmount should be at the beggining of time

I don't think it's inches. This is a Swedish product. The tables I have from Ikea measure 55cm from what I recall. The legs are 5cm wide.

I've kind of hoped some manufacturer would clue into this as a possible side benefit to their design of furniture. But the 0.0000001% of humans who want a rack at home are probably not a substantial market, so my guess is this must have been happy coincidence.

Numbers game. Lots of tables exist with a lot of dimensions. Only the ones that have the perfect dimensions are mentioned.

I used a LackRack for about 8 years, worked great. All you need a is a couple of L-brackets from the home store and 2+ Lack tables.

Ikea Hacks is a site that has a lot of other things like this. A lot of the stuff in my office and home lab is from Ikea being utilized in a way it wasn't intended.

For a few extra bucks, IKEA sells a 4 pack of casters that perfectly fit the base of these legs. Only takes a few screws and your rack is on wheels.

https://www.ikea.com/us/en/p/alex-caster-black-10480607/

https://ikeahackers.net/category/hacks/media-storage/tech-se...

Needs a (2020).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1067283

Thanks I forgot about that, added the (2020) marker now.

If you are really desperate, sure, but please don't trust thousands of dollars of hardware on a $10 cardboard table. Ikea furniture quality has been going downhill extremely fast.

Ikea oscillates in quality. Originally it was super good, then they had a cardboard period (1990's) and then when they started to be associated with 'painted cardboard' they upped their game and started to make quality stuff again (easily distinguished from the painted cardboard by the price). The last couple of years it has indeed been downhill and very rapidly so. I've found that a sharp tap on a part will tell you all you need to know, the cardboard will give and flex whereas the solid parts will hold up nicely.

The honeycombed structures are quite strong for their weight but not strong in absolute terms and you definitely don't want a book case made of that stuff.

> and you can put your bottle of Club-Mate

Damn it, now you're really making me pine!

Why must this stuff be so hard to get in the US? Last I checked there were two different companies handling distribution in the US and NEITHER of them seem to stock it anywhere! Except for one shop in LA that half the time carries expired bottles!

The caffeine high from Club-Mate is such a pleasantly sublime feeling. And you used to be able to order it from the 2600 store. I still have the yellow case!

The site I used to buy it from in quantity for US import is defunct as of this year :(

Would love to hear from anyone who can get it in the US

I haven't checked the situation in a while but it appears there are some online retailers that seem to be new venues for distribution

https://club-mate.com/, click 'buy online'

Try other maté-based drinks, variations of yerba mate beverages can be found in most US grocery stores (with increasing availability over the past several years). I can't stand any of the carbonated ones I've tried in the US, but they are out there.

Indeed, I like to buy mate in bulk at the latin-american markets, you can usually get a pound of it for cheap

I've even had some progress making my own carbonated mate drink, but it can be hard to get the flavor right

Amusingly, even thought I live in Berlin and have it readily available, I tried to make it myself by making mate concentrate, sugar, and a tiny bit of lemon. I got the taste just about right, but more mate-y with the really grassy, earthy taste of mate. But it had so much caffeine that I couldn't think straight and felt jumpy. I came to the conclusion that Club Mate doesn't actually contain much mate.

But if you love the stuff and can't get it, it's not hard to experiment. Those are basically the only ingredients.

Yeah thats the conclusion that I met too, it must be really thin. I had some luck experimenting with honey in my own attempts as well.

I have like 10 of these tables in my shop. They are incredibly robust for as light and cheap as they are.

Let's also not forget the Lack's crucial role in forming the Standesk 2200, a classic standing desk hack:

https://alphacolin.com/ikea-standing-desk-for-22-dollars/

Interesting interview with Shane Smith claiming Ikea furniture is from North Korean slave labor camps in Siberia. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJ0Kk8W1UJA

I built one with two tables. The legs are now empty so in order to drill things to the legs you need to insert a piece of wood that fits inside the legs and cut to the height accordingly.

It's also perfectly sized as housing for Prusa i3 3d printer, and people have been doing it a lot: > https://www.google.com/search?q=ikea+table+prusa+i3&client=f...

Truly magical piece of furniture.

These are also commonly used for 3D printer enclosures. Get two and flip one upside down and stack them, add some walls and a door and you’ve got an enclosure.

I'd be a bit careful. Rack problems usually involve physical damage to kit.

It would suck to have your $20,000 server go kablooey, because you saved $120 on the rack.

I think this is aimed at cheapo home-labbers like myself. I doubt enterprises would consider putting a £20,000 rendering machine inside one of these.

Another option might be stereo rack mount equipment. Probably cheaper than enterprise, and usually designed to be attractive.

Stereo (like telecom) racks may not have sufficient airflow, especially when "closed" - have to check.

The best racks are the surplus ones left laying around; if you know someone who deals with buildings after companies have moved out you'll have an endless supply of racks.

Good point. Make friends with people “in the trades.”

Somewhat relatedly, IKEA used to sell a RAST nightstand that made for a good cheap modular synth case. https://www.synthtopia.com/content/2015/07/06/how-to-make-a-... Sadly they stopped selling these a few years ago.

can somebody with more server/home server experience explain to me the benefit of going with a rackmount setup vs let's say, just building a second PC to use as a home server? I recently bought a house and am excited to get into home networking/home server work, but don't know anything about rack mount. Is rackmount equipment cheaper than regular consumer PC hardware?

> Is rackmount equipment cheaper than regular consumer PC hardware?

Never

You can find incredibly cheap (nearly free) used servers for pickup if you’re patient. If you have cheap electricity (or better yet, provided with your lease), a 2013-era dual Xeon server is pretty compelling at $50.

Wish I can find an Xserve for that much!

Apple didn’t make that many, so they would be tough to find. And they were a really pain to actually use. I didn’t find them very friendly at all to work with physically. Very polished, but had a feel of being over engineered.

That part about power is key. Some of the commercial gear is thirsty enough you'll notice it right away on your bill.

Thankfully I live in Quebec. My salary may suck compared to the US but at least I get that sweet sweet cheap hydro power.

The main advantage of rackmount is for big data centers where you have a huge number of boxes and they all fit in standardized racks. For home use of a few boxes there is no advantage other than if you want to buy cheap servers off ebay.

Used rackmount equipment can be had for cheap when businesses decommission them. The depreciation curve is much sharper than typical consumer gear when it goes out of support. New rackmount gear is very expensive.

Many people who have home servers (me included) buy used enterprise gear for this reason.

How would you suggest going about buying used enterprise gear? I was thrilled to get a decommissioned optiplex and old monitor from an old job, but that's just because I happened to be in the office the day the stuff was lying around. Otherwise I have no idea how to get that kind of stuff

It's typically ebay for me, possibly craigslist as well if you live in a big city.

Already discussed at length here on HN as well and especially r/homelab et. al., algolia search to the rescue:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

http://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/

http://www.reddit.com/r/HomeNetworking/

http://www.reddit.com/r/HomeServer/

https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php

Good luck! Rackmount machines are their own world. Done right they last longer than desktops with the added benefit of typically being quite loud. Stay cool. B-)

I've been happily self hosting with used workstations from local businesses that I have contacts at. When they upgrade they offload old workstations for nothing. They usually have Xeons and ECC ram and make great, quiet servers. Rack mount can be really loud, especially 1u.

For networking gear, it can be nice to have a small rack, but very much not necessary.

The only real reason to rack mount at home is organization: If you have a firewall, switch, router, a server, a NAS, and a backup battery, it's really nice and clean to enclose it all in a rack.

However, rack equipment will always cost more than non-rack equipment because rack equipment isn't targeted for consumers. An APC UPS that fits in a rack is $500, when the equivalent standalone one is $150.

Noise is another downside to rack equipment: It's designed to run in rooms with massive air conditioners, so the noise floor they're trying to stay under is "sports stadium".

> when the equivalent standalone one is $150.

There often aren't actual equivalents available in consumer, so it's hard to get an apples-to-apples comparison. Which isn't to say a consumer grade piece of kit won't be fine for your use, just that you aren't paying $500 vs $150 for "the same thing", rather the $500 one has a bunch of feature and/or component quality stuff you may not care about (and some extra margin, but nothing like 200% you suggest)

When buying new and presented with the option, the rack mounted option will be more expensive (because professional) and louder (no space for large fans, they compensate with higher fan speeds). Rack mounts are more interesting for network hardware (because of lack of options) and second hand. Second hand rack-mounted stuff can be very cheap for the performance you get, but also energy hungry and loud.

Most rackmount servers have some sort of remote management interface, which makes it a lot easier to work with them on a headless basis.

Pitfalls: Server-class hardware can take a very long time to POST, as they're intended to run 24x7, and (especially 1U and 2U boxes) tend to have extremely loud fans.

If you want a quiet server, your best bet is to build it up from a server motherboard and a 4U case, and use quiet fans like Noctua.

Careful with that. Server hardware is designed in a way that assumes "cooling is free because i live in a chassis with constant high airflow in a temperature controlled room".

Consumer-class hardware is more often built with the assumption that it's going to get thrown in an all-glass case starved of airflow, so they put heatsinks everywhere and expect specific air pathways in a standard atx case.

You're probably fine to go either way really, but the hardware is probably going to have a lower lifetime by going for slower airflow.

this!

If you are concerned about noise, do not buy a 1U unit. Small fans still need to move air. Since they are small the way to make up for this is to have a lot of them and make them spin very fast. The faster they spin the more noise they make.

Rackmount stuff is usually more expensive because it's more niche or professional grade stuff. If you just need a pc for a router it's overkill. If you need space for a pc router, nas and dozens of hard drives, multiple switches, A/V distribution gear, wifi and wireless hardware, home automation hubs, backup power battery, etc. it starts to make more sense to consolidate it all in a rack instead of strewn all over shelves and tables.

> Is rackmount equipment cheaper than regular consumer PC hardware?

Not even close for new, but a generation or two old can be had very cheaply.

I was was once gifted a 128 node cluster (with the racks, UPS, everything) to a lab for the tax write off alone - they even provided shipping. The servers were only 3 years old iirc, but had depreciated enough on their books I guess and they wanted a faster cluster.

Shipping and write off is much cheaper than disposal.

I recall as college students finding a VAX 780 on the "getting rid of it" part of the engineering loading dock and we got permission to get rid of it for them. Pushing it down the street at 11pm was interesting (getting a weird look from a police car going by).

It got gutted for parts (power supplies don't care too much about what they power) and converted into a lockable bookshelf and 14" diameter wall hangings (and some surprisingly strong magnets).

The "yea, we let a bunch of college students take it" was a significant savings over getting a truck to haul it off to some junkyard even before the days of being very picky about electronics recycling.

There has been a number of solid responses but my two cents.

It isnt about the "form factor" - but the cost. Businesses buy rackmount servers because it is space-efficient.

Eventually they sell these off very cheap and unlike your desktop grade equipment business servers are built to last. while that 5 year old business server may be out of date for them, they still have plenty of life left and can be had for dirt cheap.

i have a multimedia server in my basement with 72GB ram and dual Xeon's which i picked up for around the cost of a decent desktop motherboard.

So in short. Rackmount equipment purchased brand new is very expensive, but buying old "end-of-life" gear is very cheap. The depreciation on computer equipment would put a car to shame.

Very cool points. do you have any advice for how one can get retired enterprise equipment?

Separately from what others are saying about used equipment being very inexpensive, which is all very true, I have a different take on why I do it.

I'm a gamer and upgrade my primary gaming machine on a much tighter cycle than a lot of other people, which means I have a fair bit of hand-me-down hardware around to pass along. Sometimes, instead of just selling/trading/giving my old stuff away, I'll stick the consumer-grade stuff inside my 4U rack boxes.

Basically, it comes down to customizability and the space to do what I want in it.

For example, my NAS server's case has 18 drive bays. With modern motherboards supporting NVMe, it's very doable to run the OS off NVMe, a couple of caching SSDs and an array that is 20TB+ large, and bonded 2.5GBe (maybe upgrading to 10 someday) to my VM Host machine. Most out of the box NAS systems don't do that.

My other server I use for hosting VMs and cracking hashes (not crypto, think password cracking) and has a few older GPUs in it to accelerate that task.

Nowadays a lot of consumer-grade CPUs have as many or more cores than older second hand server equipment, and often can run lower power (not always true). Plus putting it into 4U boxes means I can more larger fans so it's quieter than traditional aircraft-engine servers.

This is by some people's definition "doing it wrong" because I don't have ECC memory, etc., but the reality is I've been running it for years now and it's been very stable, with only one hardware failure over the course of the decade or so I've had this system together.

> Nowadays a lot of consumer-grade CPUs have as many or more cores than older second hand server equipment, and often can run lower power (not always true). Plus putting it into 4U boxes means I can more larger fans so it's quieter than traditional aircraft-engine servers.

So you use consumer CPUs in rackmount hardware? Are you able to use any consumer PC components in a rackmount rig? I'd love to build a home server and I can see the benefit to better ventilation/noise result with rackmount, and I imagine rackmount uses the same hard drives, but are other PC parts equally usable?

Old arcade cabinets with rackmount stiles screwed to the inside. Just be aware that fibreboard doesn't compress like plywood or real wood, so screws can tear out if not seated properly. You can also put foam inside to abate the noise of rackmount fans.

I have since moved on to a custom built arcade cabinet for my rackmount workstation and UPS.

I bought a couple of used lack's as I was planning on mixing eurorack with other equipment. I ended up keeping the lack's, but instead putting 16u free-standing racks on the top of each one - ended up working perfectly: 1u power supply, with 5 3u enclosures for eurorack on each.

ended up working out much better than my plan.

The ads on this site are bonkers, is this the original article?

edit: appeareantly it's a legit site: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boing_Boing. Buzzword seems legit compared to this.

Boing Boing used to be one of the coolest sites on the internet! I think a lot of people still have it bookmarked/RSSed/whatever, so they still keep publishing, but it doesn't feel like a work of love anymore (IMHO). It feels more like someone said "hey, we've got this site that gets a bunch of traffic, it'd be a shame not to monetize it".

Just to add some more context, these were used back in the day at chill areas of hacker conferences.

Back then wifi (if available) was not very reliable, and battery tech less advanced. People carried network cables and extension cords in their backpack.

The melamine pads under the feet of the Lack tables become brittle with time and eventually crack under only 30-ish kg of weight, causing the table to slant. My own experience.

I wonder if it would help to fill them with some high density expanding foam? (Using some form of resin would probably be prohibitively expensive).

Maybe snap/chisel the melamine off and replace with felt pads or something.

You're thinking about the ends? I made some end caps for Lack tables that you can 3D print. For when you shorten the legs. https://github.com/borud/ikea-lack-leg-end-cap

What I did was get wood sticks cut to the exact size that fits inside the legs, then you can drill stuff safely to it.

I have those tables as cheap quick tables (that can stack) for kids activities. Very nice for a quick surface / desk for the little kids.

Had a LackRack(ish) running in my closet for a year or so.

It's a good and dirty way to free up space on top of your server(s) for a monitor and keyboard.

Sad they stopped selling the lack that had a bottom shelf and was on castors. I had a 45 drives server in it for years before moving.

Headline says 2020, but I'm fairly certain this has been a thing for at least a decade or two.

>Pictured above is Paul Curry's £5 example, replete with vinyl wood texture.

I don't think "pictured above" means what they think it means as the image above is an outline drawing showing no wood texture whatsoever.

Has the editorial process really fallen to this level? (Hint: Yes it has)

Between the outline drawing and the description is a tweet containing a vinyl wood texture, but the image failed to be embedded.

The image above is a tweet showing just that (after the outline drawing). Perhaps your browser didn't load it properly?

I think you have some kind of adblock service blocking embedded twitter posts because when i look at that website there is a tweet by Paul Curry of exactly what is described

There's a tweet embedded there with a photo attached to it; perhaps your content blocker is removing it.

The problem: extreme noise.

Racks are made of metal, not least because the server is only supported at one end (its a cantilever) which applies a lot of force to the support - there is a lot of leverage.

You know you are in HN when people use S3 to upload photos, and not imgur.

S3... Harder to use... Gotta pay egress....

It seems worse all round.

On top of that, Imgur automatically deletes EXIF data, which would've prevented GGP from leaking their home address.

I am not a machine.

I'm not a cat.

oh ya rookie move - stripped that and wiped my CF cache

This touches a semi-related nerve. When you share a photo on iOS there’s an option to remove exif data—or at least the photo’s location—but there’s no way to always have it removed by default. Really annoying and easy to forget. /rant

I think the default is to remove everything. I like to archive nice photos and because of that always have to ask family members to resend the image with metadata enabled.

I’ll have to investigate that somehow, whenever I open the share panel the location option is enabled.

I think that you can at least choose for photos you take to not have location data at all in camera settings.

I found out because the feature of mapping of where your pictures where your pictures were taken did not work for me, because I stopped the camera from having location data.

Sure but I like that feature for myself, but not for apps that snoop your photos’ location data for illegitimate reasons, WhatsApp for example.

Who or what is GGP?

Grand grand parent I suspect.

Throw it behind cloudfront. You now get a terabyte of egress free.

If you’ve already got a bucket ready to roll for this sort of thing, S3 is cheap, straightforward, with a stable interface and API, ownership over your assets, and a much lower chance your content will end up placed on-page and strongly associated with stuff that isn’t yours.

Higher chance they'll get hotlinked somewhere and you'll get a huge bill, however.

Free beats cheap. Imgur and its comeptitors are also straightforward. You don't really need an API for a single upload. The ownership and control argument is great in theory, but this is now an image on the internet. Anyone can link to it which will cost you money. Anyone can download it and upload to somewhere else. That means all appearances of control are artificial. I don't see much benefit here.

> You don't really need an API for a single upload.

Au contraire, what I “didn’t really need” was an entire image processing and sharing platform run for someone else’s benefit. That image sharing platform is itself primarily accessed via the use of a grossly overweight multiple-API client called a “web browser”.

No, what I want is a programmatic interface with multiple language bindings and a command line tool, so I don’t even have to leave the terminal. When I share an image, my preferred service for this is a bucket.

>what I “didn’t really need” was an entire image processing and sharing platform run for someone else’s benefit.

Do you think AWS is run as a public service? If you aren't hosting it on your own hardware, someone else is benefiting.

>That image sharing platform is itself only accessible via the use of a grossly overweight multiple-API client called a “web browser”.

The web browser that you are using to post this comment?

It takes two clicks of the mouse to upload something to Imgur. Maybe you have built an S3 workflow that is nearly as seamless, but it would be tough to beat Imgur for simplicity.

I got no problem if anyone prefers to upload images like this. People have their own preferences and I can't argue with "I prefer to stay in the terminal". However "I like this better" is a different statement than "this is better" and the comment I replied to was closer to the latter.

hard to imagine someone stooping to this level of antagonistic misrepresentation because they disagreed with someone else’s preference for image hosting, but there it is.

“two clicks of a mouse” - that’s a negative, not a positive, attribute. I’d rather not use a mouse, when possible. And yes, my S3 “workflow” is a very short shell script.

are you actually interested in which user agent I use to access HN, or was that just a snide assumption? I mean, sure, sometimes it is, but it’s ableist arrogance to assume everyone’s using a fat graphical client. Folks really don’t always use a web browser, or touch a mouse, to interact with websites.

Please don't take HN threads further into flamewar. It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for.

Please especially avoid tit-for-tat spats, which are especially boring and tedious.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Cloudfront makes S3 effectively free for hobby applications. That’s what I use for my self hosted version of Imgur.

I truly don’t understand downvotes here. Imgur’s fine; S3’s fine; different people have different use cases. How is that contentious?

Because some folks can’t distinguish between contextual value judgements based on their own preferences, and a universal absolute.

It becomes a discussion of engineering decisions

Downvotes are not for disagreement, they are for demoting off-topic or otherwise unhelpful conversational threads.

This is incorrect.

This is uninformative.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32521279.

(Nothing wrong with a whimsically off-topic observation like this, but boy did the subthread turn lame.)

It seems like a sketchy idea to directly screw in the server to the table legs. Much better to install rack sliders that are supported from both front and back.

Just don't pull out the server if there's no one holding down the table. Or better, keep servers where they belong: in a freaking data center, NOT your house ! :-)

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