“Project Mini Rack” wants to help you make your non-closet-sized homelab a reality
I have one standard rack appliance in my home: a Unifi Dream Machine Pro. It is mounted horizontally in a coat closet, putting it close to my home’s fiber input and also incidentally keeping our jackets gently warm. I can fit juuuuuust about one more standard rack-size device in there (maybe a rack-mount UPS?) before I have to choose between outer-wear and overly ambitious networking. Were I starting over, I might think a bit more about scalability.
Along those lines, technologist and YouTube maker Jeff Geerling has launched the Project Mini Rack page for folks who have similarly server-sized ambitions coupled with a lack of unreserved square footage. “I mean, if you want to cosplay as a sysadmin, you need a rack, right?” Geerling says in the announcement video.
It’s a good time fall into the compact computing space. As Geerling notes in a blog post announcing the project, there’s a whole lot of small-form-factor PCs on the market. You can couple them with single-board computers, power-over-Ethernet devices, and network-accessible solid state drives that allow you to stuff a whole lab into a cube you can carry around in your hands.
