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Those photos make me feel much happier about the cabling I inherited from my ex-boss! :D

Was that ladder forced through a gap or has it been there for years and the cables have been draped round like cobwebs in an abandoned house? :p
 
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It does look from the first cabinet on the right like it did at one point start off quite organised, and then descended into chaos.

What I'm still unsure of is what was there first, the cabinets or the ladder!
 
Went from a sparsely populated 24U Dell rack to a much lower power, quieter and office desk friendly setup.

Got wood? :D

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Had some solid oak worktop left over from the desk built, few cuts and a bit of Danish Oil later. Added some rack ears, an HP v1910-16g (fan modded to silence it) and a bit of cable management.

HP Microserver Gen8 - E3-1220L, 16GB, 2x 250GB SSDs and a 2TB drive for download and scratch space.
HP Microserver Gen7 N40L, 12GB RAM, 1x 128GB SSD and another 2TB for scratch space.

Gen7 does the Internet facing VMs such as TS3, mail, web.
Gen8 does home infrastructure, Plex etc.

Next step will be to move the Synology DS1813+ in, add another NIC to the Gen8 and then LACP a bond for iSCSI storage.
 
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Very nice and neat... That's the sort of thing I want to do.. Just want to figure out what I need and what I'll use it for..

I know there is an Ikea table a lot of people use for rack stuff.. anyone know which one?
 
I bought my house in March and soon after lifted the floorboards to install network cabling. Installed 16 points so far, but may add a few more in the future. They all run back to a cabinet in the under stairs cupboard which until tonight was tucked under the slope of the stairs and getting rather toasty. Disk temperatures were getting close to 50ºc and plenty of stagnant warm air.

It's now in a more central position and directly in line of a fan blowing air into the room. The lower rack has a NetApp DS14 and a few pizza box servers running a mix of ESXi and HyperV. The top rack has a Cisco 3750 PoE switch, 2960G and ASA5520 in use for connectivity around the house. There's also a Juniper SSG140 and Cisco 2901 for future projects.

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Storage wise, I have a Synology NAS for CCTV and online backup of critical data, and a HP Microsever with a couple of RAID1 arrays for daily storage.

Once I can stomach the energy use, the DS14 will be put into use. An APC UPS provides redundant power for the Synology and Microserver.
 
@agw_01 Would the 1242AG not be better placed outside the cupboard?

I had an almost identically positioned setup (cupboard under the stairs), but have recently moved the rack to the garage to keep temps down (both in the house and for the devices themselves), but I always had the APs (one upstairs, one downstairs, one conservatory) mounted high and in the open as I found trying them in cupboards reduced throughput unneccesarily.
 
AP position isn't final but the house isn't huge so coverage isn't too bad. You're lucky to get 20Mbps out of a 1242 on a good day anyway. Could probably do with moving it a little further towards the back of the house to improve the signal in the garden. I have quite a few of these APs from when we upgraded them at work so could always add another.

I ran cables into most of the rooms but didn't have the bottle to go into the loft and face the spiders :o :D When I decorate the landing I'll revisit it and chase some cables into the walls to go up into the loft.

The front of the house gets the sun all morning which makes the hall pretty warm with the equipment running. I either need to put up a thermal/blackout curtain over the front door or get an Aircon unit. With the price of a decent unit, I'm going to try the curtain first!

What kit are you running?
 
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