Not sure if anyone has done this before but… You’ve seen the IKEA Lack rack, well this one is made from an IKEA Eket. It’s made with 1in square dowels, and some washers between the dowels and rack rails to bridge the gap. The PDU is just a flush mount desk power strip with its sides trimmed. Overall goal with this project was to make the cheapest presentable 10” rack. Overall cost of the Eket, Dowel, screws, and vertical rails was around $50. IKEA recently dropped the price of the Eket by $5 so today it would be $45
Not much on it currently, just a managed 2.5G POE switch, U6 Enterprise and a MOCA adapter since my home isn’t wired with RJ45.
If anyone is genuinely interested in a parts list I’ll leave a comment below.
(Ignore the upside down rack shelf, the switch was too fat. I’ll have to make custom rack ears for it)
Really remedial question. I see this configuration a lot, and have never known what it is doing. What is this where you have device feeding directly in to a device right below it with a whole bunch of tiny cables? I'm guessing the thing at the top is router handling VLANs. And the thing below a switch. But I still don't get what this is doing.
Top component seems a patch panel. What I don’t get is why a patch panel if they don’t have Ethernet/Cat5+ cabling.
Seems like the patch panel & jumpers are just for extending in-room patch cables, to make it look cleaner. I suppose it might improve portability, with the patch panel effectively documenting where the device patch cables need to be connecting. (I’m assuming RJ45 coupler keystones.)
It was definitely to make it cleaner overall. And yep the patch panel is just RJ45 keystones.
This rack does not contain a router. In essence it pretty much just houses my access point. My router is in my basement. The top device is the MOCA adapter, which converts ethernet running through coax cables in my walls to RJ45. Then the it is plugged into the patch panel (specifically the port labelled "LAN"). A white patch cable then connects to my switch. Allowing for whatever devices connected to the switch to be connected to the network. All the other ports in my patch panel are devices specifically in my room. So stuff like my WAP, my PC, maybe a raspberry pi in the future, ect. ,ect. All of them connect to the switch via the patch panel.