When you want a network rack but you're more of a woodworker than a welder

I did this a year or so ago. I wanted a network rack but didn’t want to spend any money on it. I have a cnc and had a pile of plywood scrap so I gave it a shot.



The computer was running OPNSense with Zenarmor. I have since replaced the old router with a Unifi gateway max and have turned that pc into my local AI server.

Nothin fancy but it was fun to do.

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I’ve done some lumber solutions at work, though the rack itself was normal:


Rolling racks were expensive, 2 2x6s and some caster wheels and screws + a simple wall rack, much less so.

I don’t think I have photos of it, but I’ve done the same (but without the wheels) to mount a wall rack underneath a set of stairs at one of our buildings that’s a weird house upstairs office downstairs warehouse in the back type of place.

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That is very cool rack. On your power rack can you choose which way those receptacles face? That’s very cool.

They are static, it’s a WattBox smart PDU, I think they arranged them like that so you could fit more right-angle power bricks. With the OVRC cloud software (and I’d assume LAN, but I never tried that) you can power cycle each outlet, and you can set it to bring them back on in a specific order with delays between each in the event of a power failure, that sort of thing. Real neat PDUs.

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