2005-04-15: The First Rack's Up

When I first moved in, the previous owner left a whole lot of particle board furniture, mixed in with some random wood-and-screw creations of his own. One such creation was the wooden almost-but-not-quite server rack nestled between the two particleboard cabinets in this picture. Its dimensions were almost exactly that of a server rack, and so Brian was storing a few of his rack-mounted boxes in there. Its structural stability was almost entirely derived from the cabinets pressed up tightly against it on both sides, as you can see from this picture, in which Brian causes it to lean to the side simply by touching it with his finger.

At any rate, after removing the side wings from the rack, I was able to drag it along the floor into the California room, and almost get it into position on my own. Thanks to Craig showing up later, we were able to move one of the white cabinets out of the way so that the rack could be wheeled into place behind the cabinet. The end result was quite nice, although as you can see here, it's half-full of rack mounted hardware, has a few machines stacked on top of the rack gear, and then has a pair of squirrels thrown in for good measure. I anticipate it will take Brian until the end of the year to overflow this rack, particularly considering that my own Sun 220R is temporarily eating up a bit of space in his rack.

This accounts for one of the three server racks Don and I picked up from Printable.com last weekend; I do have plans for my two. Specifically, I'm going to use them for an entertainment center setup. Take a look at this location. Now, replace the end tables on either side of the TV with server racks, suspend the plasma TV between the racks, move all the AV gear and the computer into one of the racks, perhaps mount the speakers on the sides of the racks, and certainly get the TV stand out of the picture entirely. Lastly, the lamp's function will be replaced by illumination strips along the tops of both racks, for indirect lighting that won't provide any glare on the TV screen. I may even use LED strips. Of the two racks, one will hold electronics; the other, will probably store DVDs for the most part. One thing is for sure: I'll secure massive amounts of 'geek cred' for such a task.