sean's place

Showing Off my Rack

The rack in the basement.

I’ve always wanted to have a rack of equipment in my house. I don’t know why, but I’ve always had a fairly strong IT-oriented bent to my geekery (networks, servers, and things) and having my own rack just seemed like a natural thing.

So, when I finished my basement, I made a special point to finally achieve my rackish goal.

And here it is!

I have 15 ports of Cat5e running through to the various rooms in my town house all terminated into a patch panel and then into the ProCurve 1800 at the top. I also broke out and terminated my phone lines onto that patch panel; so now I have 4 and 4 (incoming lines from Qwest, outgoing lines to my wall jacks) that can be patched together however I want. I did the same thing to the 12 runs of coax I had; they all terminate into a coax patch panel (inputs from Comcast, Dish Network, and DTV Antenna — outputs to all the jacks around the house).

All the media center equipment and servers are also in this room (out of picture, except avifors – the Dell at the bottom right).

All in all, I’m pretty happy with this setup and pretty eager to show it off. So, here it is

(also in picture: Cisco 2950 and 2600 for testing/learning purposes, APC by Schneider Electric¹ UPS, and shelf with the cable modem, VoIP adapter, and WAP).

^{1 – I just couldn’t help myself.}