FutureRack: Server racks are everywhere. Now you can find them in your home | Hacker News Reader

FutureRack: Server racks are everywhere. Now you can find them in your home

futurerack.info

121 pointszdw61 comments

Never forget the Lack Rack

https://web.archive.org/web/20220121090117/https://wiki.eth0...

I was thinking about building one of these but I read that IKEA have cut costs on the materials and the legs/table are mostly honeycomb inside so no longer strong enough for something like this.

Would be interested to hear if anyone has any luck with the 'modern' version of the Lack because a lot of the resources you find online are from the 2010s when the table had a more solid structure inside.

I would probably just build one from scratch. Get 4 poles and a board for bottom / top and that should be it. Or buy a second hand small rack with noise isolation.

How hard would it be to replace the legs with solid wood ones? From the guide I think you can just drill some holes in the replacement legs and it should work: https://www.ikea.com/us/en/assembly_instructions/lack-coffee...

(Of course, you can make your own tabletop as well!)

Depending on your setting for a lack rack, you’re better off just framing out 2x4s into a box rather than going through the effort of replacing the legs.

Those legs never were solid. I recall a few videos on YouTube about that, where people put a solid wood insert into them.

I tried that without strengthening but it was to fragile. Got a music rack, tiny one, and shallow, low power rack servers. It was fine but eventually I scrapped all of that due to space issues at home.

BTW Mirkotik now sells a cool homelab worthy rack.

I cut a couple open recently, and the legs are actually hollow. No honeycomb. The top ~40mm and bottom 15mm are wood composite plugs, and the center is air. The skin is about 2.5mm thick wood-ish material with vinyl-ish wrap.

I have a rack in my house and I hate it.

My friend has a Home Theater/AV side business and my wife wanted to have a huge TV and audio setup in the basement of our new home. My wife gave the vague spec of “I don’t want to see that” when she saw the receiver. What she really wanted was just a cabinet under the TV. Sadly my friend is really into the Home Theater subreddit.

Skipping a lot of the story, I thought I was making my wife happy by letting my friend run multiple 100ft/33m Ethernet and audio cable runs to put a giant AV rack into the basement closet. There were multiple issues with this, but after the month of debugging and removing the weird Reddit ideas, I’m mostly left with my closet being non-useful as I have a huge steel box blocking taking things in and out of it. The components themselves would fit better at their point of use rather than in this space.

A friend of mine has a spare bedroom with his home lab racks in there… which means he no longer has a spare bedroom between the space taken up and the sound level of server room style hardware. OSHA friendly sound levels are not the same as “I’d like to sleep now” sound levels. The cooling hardware for real server components is meant for constant high demand in a demanding area. Not… your living room when you just want Home Assistant and to block ads.

Racks make a lot of sense in real server setups. They maybe make sense in your unfinished basement. This setup might make sense in a hip startup where you want your office to look nice but you really do need some hardware for your intranet or do your dev on an in office box.

For most homes? If you have a mechanical room you might just want a nice NEMA cabinet or a wall mount half rack up and out of the way. You’ll thank yourself for not living with this thing.

I have a rack and i love it but i would hate it in your situation. I have an unfinished storage space where the rack now resides comfortably away from people holding most of the gear for the house. It has wheels so it let me accomodate building up my basement by having all my gear in it in the original location then running fiber and ethermet to new location, unplughing the rack and pushing it over then reconnecting rack dostribution switch to new cables. Then building the rest of the wall and basement.

It's like cargo shorts for your house. I bet the wife approval factor of this is gonna be through the roof.

I think this is aimed towards the unwifed.

My wife loves racks! More storage options always seem welcome, but not sure about server racks specifically, a bit too industrial look I'd guess.

The wife loves my rack (as I love hers) because I did NOT set it up in the living room but in the sewer room. All she ever has to see if it is that Infuse works correctly all the time, even when the Internet is down.

Technical requirements aren’t the only ones!

Am the wife, have rack in our basement. Hosts an R640 for Plex and switch where all the ethernet in the wall-drops terminates.

Would recommend, it's nice owning a bunch of storage. Wish residental uplink was better but it's good enough.

Can anyone recommend a good value for money website to buy server racks for indie projects?

Server racks seem to be VERY EXPENSIVE based on my quick research: https://www.startech.com/ I guess is because they are niche field targeting a wealthy audience. Technically they don't seem complicated but they likely have to be from very strong materials in order to sustain the weight of many servers' shards.

They can be super cheap or free if you buy used. Check local classifieds.

I checked ebay but I saw only a 10 units open frame for 200 USD. Is that the used market pricing in 2024?

I see 15U for 50 bucks here. Check more local sites where businesses sell their old ones, same way also works for Herman Miller chairs and other office supplies usually. In my case it’s eBay classifieds but it might be Craigslists or local newspapers for you.

Try used + collection only within X miles

I've found 15U/£50, 18U/£150, 42U/£125 all off a quick first page search.

Don't buy new. That's for DCs and hyperscalers. Buy used. Even better: make lackrack

Thank you! I heard about it and forgot it!

"Somehow, it was discovered that Ikea’s Lack table line provides a near perfect fit for rack-sized hardware."

https://ericvb.com/index.html@p=3717.html

The problem is they’re bulky and extremely heavy. This is a disaster for shipping.

You need to use craigslist local or facebook marketplace - even a “racks wanted will remove” ad can sometimes get responses.

Or do what I do and use a lack rack until a metal one becomes available.

Letting local colleges/companies know can also pay dividends.

Beware the differences between a server rack and a telco rack.

I'm pleased with Orion. A requirement was flat pack as it was destined to go up a home staircase. Cabinet was a good idea, as opposed to rack, as the steel sides and lock are good features for a box of expensive things that lives in a home environment. 600mm wide was fine, there's still space down the sides for cables and the like and that means it goes through doorways.

Here are some fairly inexpensive racks, you can probably find others similar to these if you search (unfortunately "rack" is not a great keyword, so add qualifiers like "19 inch" or "relay rack" or "EIA"):

https://www.connectzone.com/data-racks.html

If you only need a small one there's lots of things like this (both straight and angled):

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004THBHR0

When buying a full rack you have to be careful because there are two incompatible standards, older racks meant for telephone companies and racks meant for music and electronic gear. They have different spacing for the holes. If you get the wrong spacing you can still use it, but you'll either have to drill and tap your own holes or only attached your rack mount gear at the bottom with one screw on each side, rather than two screws on each side and there may be some small gaps between equipment. I think (but do check) the home audio gear compatible standard is the 19 inch EIA rack with 1.75 inch spacing:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/19-inch_rack

Don't forget the accessories, sliding drawers, shelves, screws, sliding shelves, etc. The cheapest racks are designed to be screwed/bolted directly into the floor, but you can bolt them to some wood such as 2x4's to create a base to make it freestanding. All the weight mostly goes behind the rack so the base should mostly extend to the rear (but also somewhat forward, you don't want all your gear falling forward onto the floor either.) Sliding shelves and drawers can shift some weight forward, so plan for that depending on what is placed in/on them.

Not sure if modular shelving is related, but makes me things of this classic from Vitsoe/Dieter Rams:

https://www.vitsoe.com/us/606

See also String Furniture

https://www.stringfurniture.com

yes! I have seen them before..

I think there are many modular shelving systems, I just happen to think the Vitsoe 606 is high quality and timeless. (I have some) Another fun aspect: You send them a photo of your wall plus some measurements and they design the system for you, in house. Downside: not cheap.

I was hoping this was the opposite, furniture designed to hide a small rack of servers...

The cat shelf would be a great addition to any homelab.

This is a very delightful website to browse on a phone. That’s it; that’s the comment.

It's a slideshow with maybe a dozen words and a few pictures per slide. You have to click navigation links at the bottom of the page.

It also hijacks the back button.

3/10 website design. At least it's not actively hostile

This seems like a solution in search of a problem. It's a cool concept but the standard 19" rack isn't wide enough to replace most shelving in the home. My shelves in the living room are 36" wide.

At the same time standard rack depth is going to be too deep for a whole lot of settings.

Furniture already has a range of fairly standard widths and depths as a starting point.

The reason it seems chaotic beyond that is because we also need variations to deal with a combination of buildings not matching that and people wanting that variation.

There's racks aimed at networking equipment, those are much shallower.

They can do fine for computer hardware too if you run something consumer-sized.

Now I’m imaging backblaze servers converted into bookshelves; you pull the case out of the rack and thumb through books laying spine up.

That’s hell on hardbacks and not great for paperback either.

20 years ago I was working in a data center and crossed through an empty rack instead of walking around to the other side. What I didn't notice is that there was something dark mounted at position 35 or so, which blended in with the top of the rack. I hit my head on it and damn near knocked myself out. Had to sit down until the stars cleared from my eyes.

I now have a greenhouse with a narrow aluminum door. Every time I pass through it I look up expecting to hit my head.

Racks in my house? DO NOT WANT. :)

I learned a similar lesson from the black crossbar at the bottom (over the black floor). Luckily I didn’t grab the network cable on the way down!

Grab the orange fibers not the yellow ones. They are thicker and hold more weight before snapping. :)

I learned to go for the big black cables. They’re power, strong, and (usually) redundant.

And if you killed the rack? Ah, well, just monkeytesting showing a configuration error. (Bombcar’s law: any dual powered rack will have one critical component that is powered from one rail only.)

> Bombcar’s law

OT, but I saw the electrical plans for a hospital. In theory, every life saving device has at least two potential power sources, and each source has both a generator (for long outages) and battery backup (for blips).

In practice, we hope there are no earthquakes.

This could work for small parts storage. There are many small drawer systems [1], but they need shelving. So you need both a shelf system and a drawer system, and they usually don't match. 17 inches wide is a common with for small drawer modules, so fitting those into 19 inch racks would work.

[1] https://www.uline.com/Grp_523/Parts-Cabinets

The main draw here is modularity, but standard 19" rack rails, uprights, mounts, or whatever they're called, are ludicrously expensive.

These plans look so 80’s cyberpunk I love it. Total integration of compute, books, Knick knacks, and cat.

The cat rack has it's uses since cats love sitting on warm computers and damaging them with fur.

If you like modular storage that is ridiculously over engineered, and you like that over engineering to be subsidized by the tax paying public instead of your own wallet.. military surplus is the way to go.

The sipr net labels are neat, some might even say stylish , but it’s also almost literally bomb proof, and ready to drop out of an airplane. Lots of them let you roll the rack out of the vibration dampening chassis for fiddling. The fiber reinforced plastic formulation and the typical olive or khaki paint job is even uv resisting. And you can jam the heaviest ancient ups you can find in there without cracking the case when you rattle it with the fork lift. Short of a fork lift.. the handles work great for heavy loads and autoretract on springs that still work when the whole thing is like thirty years old. Pour concrete inside and you can make steps or post foundations. Bolt screens onto keyboard drawers and position racks vertically, and you can have articulated protected displays that you can kick off a building. Mount pumps inside for the 4x4 rig. Stack them to the moon and the feet kind of lock into the base below so you barely need to tie them down. Put them on wheels for rad coffee tables. Get rack mount drawers and take back the kitchen, infuriating the delicate sensibility of your significant other.

I wouldn’t even tell you guys about how great these are but having like 3 dozen already I should probably stop collecting them..

Where do you get these?

IIRC, aside from government surplus auctions (which is an easy way of getting 3 dozen if you pick up on site), I think the right keywords to use are “shock mount” and some variations on military surplus, rack, case, etc.

Local pickup is the key for these things - anyone living near a major metro should inquire where the state/county/city auction location is (though sometimes they auction “in place” so pay attention).

I got something like 6 steelcase filing cabinets for $160 - even renting a truck to pick them up was still a huge savings.

From government auctions or sometimes, weirdos. You can find them on eBay and other sites sometimes too, but like other people mentioned, local pickup and bulk buys are key because otherwise with freight shipping you’ll pay 100 usd / 1u or more. Bit more information.. these have caps in the front and back for travel, but if you’re not worried about cooling and willing to drill cable holes for usage these have great sound isolation. Construction is similar to pelican cases or similar, but way more beefy. Typical individual chassis are usually 4u, sometimes 8, but not more afaik.. maybe because everything in the field should be a 4 man lift, max.

everyone loves the sound of screaming fans with a cup of coffe in the morning.

Seriously, the page is frustratingly broken on Firefox, kinda works but pages won't move reliably. Works fine on chrome.

The website seems over-engineered.

And beehives! https://xkcd.com/1439/

urg that site navigation !

This reminds me of Dieter Rams' 606 Universal Shelving System.

Bad idea unless you have a spare room. Servers are extremely noisy.

They are loud but modern servers with modern power saving keep the fans in check; my servers are normally no louder (and often quieter) than the furnace blower.

A reboot can be heard outside, however.

The whitebox ones are quieter than desktops. 4U, front to back airflow, same components you'd put in a desktop. The linear airflow is a win over the various gaming chassis designs and it being housed in a cabinet helps a little, probably a lot if you line the cabinet sides with acoustic panels or similar.

My cats would approve of the rack mounted scratching platform!

Is it just me or is scrolling mangled on this site with a trackpad? I keep trying to scroll and either get no pages or all the pages flying by me.

I got nothing and had to use the next button. Which immediately tanked my opinion of not only the website but the product.

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