After a year of silence, I come back stronger and with more fun hardware to play with. Last time, I left you all with a failed attempt at self-hosting a website/webserver. I’ve yet to go back and try again. The busyness of managing my first proper IT position and continued studies, further shows how bad I am at managing my time wisely. I’m still stuck in the habit of working on my passion projects well into the night, even if I must wake up early for the next morning’s shift. I’m excited to share with you all what I’ve got cooking over this past year. This includes what new hardware I have under my belt, what I have running on each machine, and any plans I have for building more on-top my growing homelab. Expect to see more post regarding my lab, as I’ll be setting aside proper time to work on it the new year, 2025. Here, I will only cover what new toys I have and a bit of the logistics moving hundreds of pounds of metal.
First, and most exciting, I’d like to introduce you all to Aetheria (name WIP)! This is the name I’ve given to my new APC NetShelter 42U AR3100 server rack. I got her off of Craigslist, as any good enthusiast would do. –Unless they have tens-of-thousands of dollars under their belt to buy one brand new (I do not.)– She came in at a few hundred dollars and was more expensive than other listings I saw out there. I attribute this to paying the convenience tax. What I mean by this is that, while similar and cheaper secondhand racks were available, many were located hundreds of miles away from me, making it more costly for me to arrange for transporting it back home. The APC rack was located in the same city I live in. Renting a UHaul and enlisting three people to help load her onto the truck seemed easy enough.
The sale was complete and the day came to move. The plan was simple. For this move, we were using UHaul’s 15ft truck. The truck has a extendable ramp for us to easily roll the rack up and into the trailer. The office building that we were removing the rack from had elevators, making it easy for us to grab it from the top floor and bring it down to the lot. Secure the rack in the back, head out on our way, PROFIT!
Of course, Murphy’s Law manages to reign true, even during this rack move.
When my very-non-professional team and I made it to the office building of the company who currently had the rack, we noticed how short the elevators actually were. I, myself, am only 5’8″, but my buddy who was helping in the move was 6’2″ and needed to slightly duck to get into the elevator. The rack itself measured at 6’8″. The top lip of the rack would clip with the roof of the elevator door. We got around this by using some weird geometry and holding the rack at a slight angle, bringing it down a few inches.
Ok, so the rack is 6’8″, confirmed. We made it out the small ~6′ elevator. Now to the U-Haul truck. Walking it up the ramp was no big deal. But uh-oh! While the measurements of the trailer was a solid 7’2″, the clearance to get through the trailer door is 6’5″. This was fully my own fault for not paying attention to the door clearance and only the trailer height. Once more we angle the rack to load it in the trailer, and that’s one more win for geometry!
Ok ok, the server rack is now secured into the back of the trailer. Next step in this day’s journey is to stop by my workplace and grab some old defunct servers. This is the reason why I decided a rack would be a good purchase. The list of servers and networking gear included the following.
1x Cisco 2600 Router
2x Cisco PIX 515e Firewall
1x Cisco Catalyst 3560 POE-24 Switch
2x Cisco UCS C200 M2
1x Dell PowerEdge R730
2x Dell PowerEdge R720
1x Dell PowerEdge R710
1x Dell PowerEdge 1950
11x Dell OptiPlex 3050
— Why 11 OptiPlex 3050s? Because 11 of them fit perfectly on a 4U shelf.
The idea is to load everything into the rack and transport the rack fully loaded. All that we needed was to proceed with extra care when moving through this bumpy city as we make it home. Loading the rack was not much trouble at all, only a little time consuming and a bit tiring. While this is great for transport, it will later become a pain as we’ll need to de-rack the entire cabinet so that we can actually bring it up the stairs in my old rowhome. Following more problems with door clearances and in general moving 300lbs of metal ensue, but we finally get it to its final resting space until I decide to play SysAdmin again.