Fieldnotes

Occasional notes on homelabs, networking, and keeping small systems alive.

Rebuilding the home rack, one cable at a time

The rack is a modest 12U in the corner of a spare room. Current residents:

• A low-power firewall box doing routing, DNS, and VPN duty
• One virtualization host for the services that need to stay local
• A four-bay NAS that holds the backups of everything else
• A managed switch, a patch panel, and a small UPS underneath it all

The rebuild rules were simple: every cable labeled at both ends, power and data on opposite sides, nothing blocking the front-to-back airflow. Total cost was a weekend and a bag of velcro ties. Total benefit: the next failure will take minutes to trace instead of an afternoon.