… When Simple Mechanical Issues Slow Down My Projects 😉 …

Sometimes, the smallest mechanical hiccups can derail a tech project. This weekend, I tackled one that had been waiting for over a year…

As I mentioned in my previous post, I’m planning to host a Linux virtual machine on my home network. My current idea is to use my old Raspberry Pi 3. I’m not sure it’ll work—it might not be powerful enough. In any case, I had to find a place somewhere where I could map it to a network plug. That’s when I ran into a one-year-old “pending project”… 😨

The server rack

One year ago I have started to setup a home server rack. I have bought a wall mount server rack 19” 6U and a nice switch.

I mounted everything carefully—hid the cables and organized it as best I could. Everything was ready, I just put the front glass door and then the terrible statement …

I couldn’t close the door because of the network cables.

Move the two vertical bars

The solution to solve this was to move back the two vertical bar on which one all the components (switch, patch panel, power strip, …). But I ran into another issue: the screws on the left side of the rack were blocked by the electrical panel (forgot to take pictures). Finally I had to unmount the rack from the wall, move the bars back and mount the rack back.

Final result

The server rack is now in place. With enough space for the Raspberry Pi and my NAS.

Now that the rack is finally in place, I can move forward with testing the Raspberry Pi setup. Fingers crossed it’s powerful enough!

Useful links

• Thanks to reseau-vdi.fr article I was able to prepare this project properly.