[H-GEN] Rackmount boxes at home

[Benjamin Fowler]

On 22 September 2010 04:51, Robert Brockway <robert at timetraveller.org>wrote:

> On Fri, 17 Sep 2010, Benjamin Fowler wrote:
>
>  Does anybody bother with 19" racks and rackmount server cases at home? Is
>> it worth the trouble trying to track down the required hardware to save
>> space?
>>
>
> I ended up concluding that it wasn't worth it.  The additional trouble
> acquiring special hardware isn't worth it for the space saving when space
> isn't as a premium in my home.  The servers live in a corner of the
> basement.
>
> I've been running virtual servers at home for years and have used that to
> reduce the number of physical boxes too.
>

Lucky you, you have a basement :)  My partner and I live in a glorified
shoebox, so space is at an absolute premium.  I suppose, however, that
Shuttle-sized cases could be easily concealed, and are also quiet...
important contributors to the PAF (Partner Approval Factor) of my upcoming
purchases :-)

Up until now, I've gotten away with a couple of laptops on a wireless
network, but having a mountain of torrented Spanish TV shows scattered
across the laptops is quickly becoming a pain, and I want to work from home
(have to run Oracle and various other network services at home and need
other machines), so I started thinking about what I'd need to put in place.
My first thought was getting a Drobo, but they cost a lot and are not
terribly compact so I started thinking about building a custom NAS box
(simple tradeoff of time against money, as it were), and started looking at
rack cases.

So I guess my eventual solution will be building a NAS box with a bunch of
drives, a dual-core Atom to keep it fast, cool and quiet, running FreeNAS.
And maybe a fast server box on which to run my work stuff (and VMs if I
absolutely need them).

Cheers, Ben.

-- 
Ben Fowler <somelamer567 at gmail.com>

http://facebook.com/ben.j.fowler
http://bjf-thw.blogspot.com/
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*
"**Anyone who thinks the Large Hadron Collider will destroy the world is a
twat.*" -- Prof. Brian Cox

**
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