The Rack

Most of the critical components of our network are housed in this rackmount enclosure located in an unused closet near the office. The enclosure is 69 inches tall and was obtained from Rackit Technology.

This picture shows what we currently have inside the rack. Each component is a standard 19 inches wide and is secured to the rack with several screws. Many of the items are on rails to allow them to be slid in and out for maintenance.

Starting at the top of the rack, this picture shows the patch panel and switch. The patch panel consists of connections to the network jack(s) in each room of the house, as well as a connection to the main switch in the wire closet.

The 16-port switch handles Ethernet traffic for all rooms in the house, as well as for the servers located in this rack enclosure.

A 15-inch monitor is mounted inside a special monitor enclosure. The monitor is used when it's necessary to locally administer one of the servers in the rack, such as to install an operating system upgrade.

The keyboard tray slides out to allow easy access to the IBM "space saver" keyboard we selected. This keyboard has an integrated pointing stick, so no external mouse is required.

The Belkin KVM (keyboard-video-mouse) switch behind the keyboard lets us use the same keyboard, mouse, and monitor for all of the servers. We switch among them using a special key sequence.

The three servers we currently keep in the rack are located below the keyboard drawer.

The first server is a Cobalt RAQ2 appliance. It uses a proprietary architecture with a RISC processor, has 256 megs of RAM and a 16 gig hard drive. It consumes very little power and generates very little heat. It's intended to be used by ISPs to provide web hosting space to customers without having to do a lot of work administering the machines. We bought one just because it looked cool. We currently use our RAQ as a syslog server and to host one of our web sites.

The VA Linux machine below the RAQ is our workhorse server. It has dual 700Mhz Pentium III processors, 512 megs of RAM, and an 18 gig SCSI drive. The web page you're reading right now was sent to you by this server. In addition to web hosting, we use this server for DNS, mail, and a number of custom home automation applications.

The final server is a PC we put together inside a rack mount chassis made by Antec. It has a 500 MHz Pentium III, 256 megs of RAM, and an 18 gig SCSI hard drive. It runs Microsoft Windows 2000 and serves as our DHCP server, primary domain controller, secondary DNS server, and also as a general file server.

This is another view of the PC mentioned above. It shows the drives behind the lockable door on the right side of the chassis.

Below the last server is a simple power strip. Its sole purpose is to provide a switch to turn the monitor on and off, since it's difficult to access the monitor's own control panel inside the monitor enclosure.

The bottommost component in the rack is an uninterruptible power supply (UPS) that provides about an hour of backup power for everything in the rack in the event of a blackout. It is made by MGE.

This is the top of the rack. The fan helps vent heat generated by the components in the rack. The black conduit shown entering the enclosure contains the network cables that connect each room to the patch panel.

For details on how we ran the network wires throughout the house, see this page.

This is a view of the fan (and the back of the patch panel, switch and monitor) from inside the cabinet.

This is the back of the cabinet (along with an inquisitive cat).

Here's another view of the entire cabinet with the front door open.

With the back door open, it's wire chaos.