Tuan-Anh Tran
April 1, 2020

Tips for first time rack buyer

Posted on April 1, 2020  •  3 minutes  • 509 words

Few weeks ago, I knew nothing about server rack. I frequent /r/homelab a lot in order to learn to build one for myself at home. These are the lessions I learnt during building my very first homelab rack.

Choose the right size

You need to care 2 things about a rack size: height & depth. The width is usually pretty standard 19 inches.

1u rack unit

Carefully plan what kind of equiments you want to use to get the correct size. An usual rack usually have these devices:

Things to looks for when selecting a rack

Cable management

brush panel & patch panel

The top U is patch panel. The third one is brush panel. The purpose of these panels is pretty easy to understand. I didn’t know the term to search for at first when I want to buy one.

Here are some accesories that helps with cable management:

Some notes on the patch panel. There is punch down type that looks like this and there’s pass-through type that looks like this . You probably want the keystone one as it’s easier to maintain.

If you cannot find cable combs, i saw people has been using zip tie to make DIY cable comb. It’s pretty cool.

diy cable comb using zip tie

Other tips

Numbering unit on the rack if it doesn’t have one will help a lot when installing equipments. Like this

label on rack

Most racks I saw on /r/homelab have this but the cheap rack I got doesn’t. I just got to be creative: use label maker tape along the rack’s height and hand wrote the number there.

Know something that isn’t on this list, please tweet me at @tuananh_org . I would love to learn about your homelab hacks.

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