Just wanted to share a little project I did a few months ago. I had a wall mounted network rack that I picked up on eBay for cheap that was sitting around. I thought it would be more useful as a mobile workstation instead. I strengthened it to hold up to the racking (har) forces of moving it around, added a dual monitor arm, added a top surface, added a bottom plate with wheels and support, and of course the completely custom shelves.
I designed and fabricated everything from scratch other than the drawer rails, wheels, the outside rack structure, powder coating, and the arm mount, although most of these things needed modification. All the aluminum was picked up from the scrap yard, same goes for the wood.
The "Ghost" shelf is used for drive cloning. One of the types of work I do requires sector by sector copies from one drive to another without the original systems present. We use various software packages to do this but we've always internally referred to it as ghosting, since we used to only use Symantec Ghost. Because of this I couldn't resist the decals, especially because I'm a Nintendo fanboy. The power supplies are inverted and cool the loose drives sitting on the perforated grate when they are being cloned. The left machine ties to the left monitor, the right to the right monitor so that I can keep an eye on both. I just use a USB switch to transfer mouse and keyboard. The second shelf is headless because I remotely manage its functions.
The green shelf is a Hyper-V server used for testing among other things. You can kind of see the cable management arms as well in both of the pictures. These are modified HP G8 management arms, I picked them up on eBay as a large lot for under $10 each. This way it makes pulling the system in and out hassle free. Each shelf also has very large rubber bumpers on the underside, the same ones found on amps, so I can pull them out and safely set them on delicate surfaces (like my desk).
The very bottom of the rack holds two 1500VA HP UPS units to protect the cloning procedure.
I didn't build it to enter a competition or anything. Didn't really care about a central theme or color scheme. Just did it to have fun and use up lots of spare parts I had laying around. I did buy the USB switch, some miscellaneous screws/bolts, rubber washers for vibration resistance and cabling, and the expensive but cool anti-vandal switches specifically for this project.
So yeah, lots of other details and learned some new things, but just thought someone might enjoy:
I designed and fabricated everything from scratch other than the drawer rails, wheels, the outside rack structure, powder coating, and the arm mount, although most of these things needed modification. All the aluminum was picked up from the scrap yard, same goes for the wood.
The "Ghost" shelf is used for drive cloning. One of the types of work I do requires sector by sector copies from one drive to another without the original systems present. We use various software packages to do this but we've always internally referred to it as ghosting, since we used to only use Symantec Ghost. Because of this I couldn't resist the decals, especially because I'm a Nintendo fanboy. The power supplies are inverted and cool the loose drives sitting on the perforated grate when they are being cloned. The left machine ties to the left monitor, the right to the right monitor so that I can keep an eye on both. I just use a USB switch to transfer mouse and keyboard. The second shelf is headless because I remotely manage its functions.
The green shelf is a Hyper-V server used for testing among other things. You can kind of see the cable management arms as well in both of the pictures. These are modified HP G8 management arms, I picked them up on eBay as a large lot for under $10 each. This way it makes pulling the system in and out hassle free. Each shelf also has very large rubber bumpers on the underside, the same ones found on amps, so I can pull them out and safely set them on delicate surfaces (like my desk).
The very bottom of the rack holds two 1500VA HP UPS units to protect the cloning procedure.
I didn't build it to enter a competition or anything. Didn't really care about a central theme or color scheme. Just did it to have fun and use up lots of spare parts I had laying around. I did buy the USB switch, some miscellaneous screws/bolts, rubber washers for vibration resistance and cabling, and the expensive but cool anti-vandal switches specifically for this project.
So yeah, lots of other details and learned some new things, but just thought someone might enjoy:
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