I’ve seen so many 10" servers that look amazing from the front and very polished, but then having a rats nest of cables and a mess at the back.
After 62 iterations and many 3D prints, blood, sweat, profanity and tears. I my design and implementation is finally done.
I used Hexagons where possible, because as you know, Hexagons are the bestagons
This is Before:
And the After:
The ducky adds 200MHz
The front of my mini-rack is actually still somewhat of a mess, I thought I’d focus on the back first.
I’ve published it in excruciating detail on my GitHub Leave a Star if you like what you see.
I self host a bunch of stuff on here to get away from Big-Tech, and because I find it fun. For a lot more details see https://erasmus.works/
It always bothered me the the fronts of racs are modular, but not the backs, this solves that
If you have any questions feel free to ask, hopefully this helps other clear up their rats nests.
My setup is as resilient as this would be:
I haven’t added any failure-modes
Power strips run in parallel that’s one point of failure for the whole rig.
Your setup runs in series. That’s on point of failure per powered device in the rig.
And if it doesn’t run in series, you really need to explain the wiring on the back of your rig, because I cannot make sense of it otherwise.
Huh? What is the mains cable mess for then?
I don’t think I understand your question.
If you plug all your servers into a power strip like this, all the power goes through the power strip and through one cable. If there is a fault in the power strip, all the servers will lose power as a fuse will trip.
The same is true for my setup, I have added no new failure modes.
I’m assuming this is daisy chained. In a power strip there are not cables between the plugs that can be unplugged. Nor are there switches on each individual plug that can be accidentally flipped off. Any extra component is a failure mode. If it gets unplugged it loses power just the same as any failure. Now don’t get me wrong, I think this design is clean, expandable, and offers some neat features over a plain power strip, but to suggest there aren’t extra risks associated with this design is a bit short sighted.
You’re explaining scenarios where you incorrectly use my setup.
You can wire the switches so that if switched off it only kills power to that server and nothing else in the chain. You then basically have this, but modular:
Yea if you rip out a cord that you shouldn’t you’re going to lose power, that is true of any power strip.
This has more components, so more things can fail, I will give you that, but that’s unlikely and for me at least, worth the trade off in making it modular.
If the above picture was powering your servers, and you wanted to add a 7th plug, you’d have to unplug everything and buy a power adapter with more sockets, and deal with the rats nest of cables that follows, or add another of these that might have the same problem in the future.