With the emergence of the 10 inch network rack, Jeff Geerling organized a community around the concept of mini-racks. I moved my homelab to a mini rack in early 2024 and the new community was a great excuse for me to document and publish my latest homelab/mini rack setup. The following is a re-post of my mini-rack.jeffgeerling.com mini-rack submission.
This mini rack serves two main purposes:
This has been a long term and ongoing project starting in 2019. An earlier iteration writeup is available on my blog explaining more of the motivation and specifics to the Pi cluster. Cluster Ansible roles and provisioning can be browsed here: https://src.nth.io/ansible-roles/file
The entire rack is fed from one power cable and one coax cable, excluding the ethernet drops, of course.
| U | Component | Model | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| 9 | Modem | Hitron CODA56 | DOCSIS 3.1 + 2.5Gbps |
| 8 | Gateway | UCG-Max | 2.5Gbps + 512 GB NVMe |
| 7 | AP Switch | USW-Flex-2.5G-8-PoE | Runs PoE access points and cameras, as well as cat6 drops. |
| 6 | Patch Panel | Enmane 12 Port | I prefer this specific panel because of its ratchet-based cable support/strain relief. |
| 5 | Cluster Switch | USW-Ultra | PoE powered from the AP Switch given the PDU limits. |
| 3-4 | RPI 4 Cluster | russross 2U mount | I modified the OpenSCAD model to fit my specific PoE and M.2 hat sizes. |
| 2 | M4 Mac mini | M4 Mac mini | I plan to make a custom M4 Mac mini 3d printed rack mount. |
| 1 | PDU | Tupavco TP1713 |
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