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Show Us Yer Rack!

Date:  10th November, 2004prevnext

We've had the "Logo Smackdown", we had the "Screen Grab Confab" and we've had "What's On Your Bookshelf?" and they're all well and good. But I'm a serious geek, I need to see metal, I need to see plastic, I need to see banks of flickering LEDs...

I want you to "Show Us Yer Rack!" I want to see the hardware baby.

How To Play:
  1. Take a picture of a comm's or server rack to which you have physical access.
  2. Resize or crop the image so that it is no wider than 400 pixels (use as much height as you need). Compress the image as much as possible - we want to see your kit, but we don't want to wait forever for the images to load.
  3. Upload the image to your web-server, or online image service.
  4. Post as a comment here. Use the Markdown syntax to add your image to your comment (![alt text](http://example.com/path/to/image.jpg "title")).
  5. Where possible, describe what's in the rack.
  6. If you have lots of racks, just pick the one with the most interesting bits of kit in it! :-)
  7. I don't want to exclude anyone - if you can't get an image online, just tell us what's in your rack!

I don't care whether the rack's in your house, school or workplace, just give this geek a fix...

Okay, I'll start the ball rolling with the little rack in my office (click the image for an enlargement).


Working from the top down:

  • Tucked away, right at the very top of the rack, is an Alcatel SpeedTouch 330 USB ADSL Modem.
  • Then I have a NAS appliance, a LaCie 250GB Ethernet Disk.
  • A 3Com SuperStack II PS Hub 40 12-Port ethernet hub is connected to my firewall's DMZ. I can connect Internet-facing computers here, safe in the knowledge that they are isolated from my LAN.
  • The blue box is a NetGear DS524 24-Port 10/100Mbps hub. This hub is connected to my main switch (see below) via a switchable uplink port. I use this when I want to network a few devices together, with the option of having them isolated from my LAN at the flick of a switch.
  • Beneath the hub is a Belkin OmniView Pro 8-Port KVM (PDF). This allows me to use one keyboard, mouse and monitor to control up to eight devices. Great for switching between servers and appliances.
  • Next up is my main network switch, a HP ProCurve 2224 (PDF).
  • Finally, at the bottom of the rack, is my firewall - running SmoothWall Express 2.0.

So that's me. Now tell me, what's in your rack?

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