machine room organization

[james]

On Tue, 2005-02-01 at 00:33, Saquinn624 at aol.com wrote:
> Does anyone on the list have any good tips for keeping a tidy machine room? 
> I'm sick of tripping over CPUs and dealing with cable Gorgons when switching 
> machines (I don't have near enough space for 1 monitor/keyboard/mouse per 
> workstation). A/B/[C/D/E] switches work great for serial consoles, but   not 
> workstations.

I see the KVM issue is covered well by others....

I put all I can in 4-post racks and use serial consoles on a Portmaster
or use KVM's. Old, sometimes out-of-square freebie racks are great. I
get 1 inch angle-aluminium and bolt it along the sides of the rails to
form something like a drawer slide. If a unit isn't rack-wide then I
slide a piece of plywood into the rails to make an el-cheapo shelf that
takes less than 1U.

For cable management I lash vertical runs to the rack posts. For
horizontal runs I use overhead cable trays. Since my hobby budget is
near zero I make trays by cutting 4 inch and 6 inch PVC pipe along its
length and using plumbers hangers to hang the pipe on the ceiling. It
makes an easy job of dropping cables into the 1/2 pipes.

And thats how I build a home datacenter.