The Oracle Has Landed!

If you read my blog, you know that I am really into having a home lab.  I’ve had a small Norco rack for a while to keep my servers in.  It’s worked pretty well for the most part, but as you can see, it is pretty full:

2016-05-10 18.03.44

You can probably also see that it is very dusty.  Now that I’ve decided to finally build my FreeNAS box, I have no place in the rack to put it.  At first, I thought I could just set it on top, but with two little kids, that could eventually lead to disaster.  Next, I thought about building one myself.  I’m handy, it would be a challenge, but to really get one the right size, I was going to end up spending at least $150 in parts alone.  Then I have to build it!

So what else could I do?  Purchase a new rack from the internet?  That sounds pricey, but I looked into it.  Sure enough, it is pricey.  Luckily, I live in a large metropolitan area.  And if you live in such an area, there are likely plenty of data centers getting rid of their old racks as they shrink their footprint in the now more virtualized future.  This lead me to Craigslist.  As I searched around, I found a few interesting options.  There were several Dell racks, a few HP racks, but then one caught my eye.  An Oracle rack!  I contacted the seller and for $85 I purchased a gently used 42U fully enclosed rack (after I got official wife approval).

I borrowed a truck, and a few strong backs and picked up the rack.  It was exactly as advertised and I came home with my very own Oracle rack.  Then Kscope came…and went.  Finally I was able to get the time to transplant everything over.  Here is the result:

My very small intern was here to help get everything set up correctly:

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Here’s what it looks like inside (very clean if I do say so myself):

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And here is what makes the rack awesome (for an Oracle consultant anyway):

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Now I have a place to put my new FreeNAS box.  Look for posts on that coming up in the future days and weeks.

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