Well, my 8U 10" home lab rack is finally completed.

Luckily there are no power bricks involved but my PDU does have several wall warts plugged into it.

Also, my Raspberry Pi cluster and the switch both exit out the front, but the layout alignment was completely wrong. Plus, a single 0.5U patch panel was too far away for short cable runs, and I refused to snake thick Cat6 from back-to-front in such a tight space.

The solution? I stacked two 0.5U panels to fill a 1U gap, using the second one as a literal front-facing data bridge. To avoid severe bends on the 0.5ft patch cables, I offset the connections by two keystones diagonally. It naturally curves the cables, relieves port tension, looks incredibly clean, and standard Gigabit doesn’t care about the extra hop.

It’s not stupid if it works

Full layout:

Bottom frame: There's a 12V 120mm fan on the bottom with a dust cover for air intake/cooling.

It's a GeeekPi fan but I may upgrade it to something a little more powerful later on.

1U & 2U: Pi cluster right above the 120mm fan to help ensure they don't get cooked by having other equipment below them.

1x Pi for IDS Tripwire
2x Pi on separate VLAN with strict rules to mess with OWASP Juice Shop and other pen testing environments.

3U: 2x 0.5U patch panels

4U: 8 port managed switch

5U: vent panel

6U & 7U: Protectli Vault w/ stateful firewall and IPS

8U: vent panel

The PDU is on the back (2U) with a blank panel below it to help create a chimney effect for the fan and a brush panel above it where the power cord comes out.

#HomeLab #Networking #RaspberryPi