I'm on board with most of this except the suggestion that rack mounted hardware should be kept where people live.
No.
I can't afford a house but like to tinker with networking. I pay more for weaker equipment so it will be low power/low noise. I'd love to just buy half a dozen used Dell PowerEdges but rack-mounted hardware is insanely loud.
A basement is the ideal spot. Water isn't an issue as long as your rack is not directly under anything that could leak (including on higher floors) and has a palette underneath it. If there is the possibility of your basement flooding more than 2 inches then you have bigger problems you need to address first. Keeping a rack with electronic equipment there will motivate you to do what you should be doing to the place anyway: dehumidifying and managing pests.
I’ve done this and it wasn’t good. The servers heated up the basement, and chewed through power like crazy. Plus it was heavy as hell and a pain to recycle.
Rack servers are that form factor to maximize expensive datacenter rack space. Once you are not in a datacenter regular commodity hardware is a better bet.
For home use really laptops are ideal. They have an inbuilt UPS and KVM.
Agreed, I started with rack mount stuff and quickly moved away from it. Very loud and for the budget stuff frequently used by homelabs, very power hungry for not that much performance.
I had a small rack in our old house. Mostly just to house the router/switch because the little cabinet wouldnt fit.
My wife dubbed it the EyeRack, short for eyesore.
For the most part you can easily hide this stuff in a cabinet or a bookshelf, no one will be the wiser.
Ill never really understand people using pizza box style servers, especially 1U units, in a home. With the sole exception of the one time i saw one stood veritcally behind an entertainment center. I think i was the only person at the party to notice it.
> I'd love to just buy half a dozen used Dell PowerEdges but rack-mounted hardware is insanely loud.
This is a common belief that isn’t quite correct. My 2U Dell R520 is quite quiet after the initial boot (once the BMC takes over fan control), albeit I had to do some ipmitool magic to get it to not ramp them up with non-OEM PCIe cards installed.
My 1U R420 and R320 boxes? Yeah, they’re a little loud, 40mm fans have to run at higher speeds to get air flowing.
Ultimately my lab lives in my home office and the noise doesn’t really bother me, I wouldn’t put it in the bedroom or living room though.
A 1U chassis stuffed with high power dissipation components will be insanely loud like a jet engine. But it's easy to avoid that. The key for quiet is to use 4U chassis for anything that requires significant cooling so it has large fans.
On my home rack I have three 1U computers, two are Atom-based (fanless with SSD, so zero noise) and one is a Celeron-based with slow fans (about as loud as my MacBook). The larger machine is a 4U with larger fans, so same sound level as any tower case (a 4U is literally a tower case sideways, with rack mounting tabs).
I've kept my server[0] in my basement since I moved into a place with one. I keep it elevated off the floor (not just for water concerns, but airflow, too) and under a table. Although it doesn't, it can make a lot of noise since no one's near it most of the time.
No.
I can't afford a house but like to tinker with networking. I pay more for weaker equipment so it will be low power/low noise. I'd love to just buy half a dozen used Dell PowerEdges but rack-mounted hardware is insanely loud.
A basement is the ideal spot. Water isn't an issue as long as your rack is not directly under anything that could leak (including on higher floors) and has a palette underneath it. If there is the possibility of your basement flooding more than 2 inches then you have bigger problems you need to address first. Keeping a rack with electronic equipment there will motivate you to do what you should be doing to the place anyway: dehumidifying and managing pests.