Kiran Jonnalagadda

What does it take to build your own server rack?

I wanted a small rack for a Raspberry Pi, a camera, and a few other bits, which was too many parts for a typical plastic case, but way too little for an industrial server rack. I couldn't buy a small 10" 4U server rack anywhere, so I built my own using aluminium extrusions. Then I found nobody makes a 10" rack-mountable power strip either, so I made one. Turns out everything I wanted in the rack runs on 12V or 5V, so I could ditch all those bulky power strips for my own power supply. A display? Done. Keyboard? Done-ish, because that is surprisingly harder than it seems.

Most of us have only experienced computing through a screen. The internet is just signal in the ether and the cloud is somewhere up there. Scale and size are just pinch-to-zoom. But all of those computers are real devices somewhere, and our understanding gets so much better when we bring all our senses into play.

This is a story of getting comfortable working with bare metal, from sawing aluminium at home and buying screws by the hundreds, to wiring it up and booting to login, because the bare metal of computing starts at well, the bare metal.