This is my humble rack 😎. It holds all 18U of my my playground for learning Juniper gear, Linux, Web Development, Active Directory, DNS, Reverse Proxys and ZFS File Shares among many other things!

Almost all of the equipment in this rack has been bought in used condition, for one main reason; cost. Networking gear and entaprise Servers are expensive brand new, and I don't have much money so while all of it may not be considered 'necessary' I like to spend as little as possable, to learn as much as I can on many different platfoms!

Starting from the top down, we have a PDU, or Power Distribution Unit. This conditions power to everything in the rack below it/

Next, we have a simple patch pannel. Using nice, short, thin, patch cables I am able to patch network ports from the front to the back without having to run long, unsightly cables. As well as having a chart that tells me what number of the patch pannel goes to what device on the back.

After that, we have my pièce de résistance which is my Juniper EX3300 48 Port Network Switch. I wanted to get into learning Juniper stuff a few months back because while similar to Cisco which is the industry standard, it has many similarties in the configuration of the CLI. I am currently using it as the main switch connecting everything in my rack. With the 4 SFP+ ports on it as well, I can use it to connect all of my high speed devices. I currently have a Multimode OM4 fiber ran to my desktop across the room, and 2 DAC cables connecting 2 other servers inside the rack at 10Gb speeds.

In RU4 we have a Power over Ethernet Switch. You may ask "Why do you have 2 switches?" whelp, thats because the Juniper switch above (Which was a birthday present, Thanks Mom and Dad! ❤️) I had accidentally sent them the wrong eBay listing, of the same switch howevever, without PoE.... So I need this to power security cameras and Wi-Fi Access Ponts for testing.

On a shelf below that, we have 2 Mac Mini's and a Ubiquiti Access Point. At this moment I have yet to use the Mac Mini's for much, but one of them is running an iMessage server so I can send iMessages from the web. And inbetween those, we are running Ubiquiti AP's around the house, so I placed one up here to fill in some Wi-Fi gaps.

On another shelf below that, we have some Dell Mini PC's. Starting at the top left, I am runnning Home Assistant, which is open-source, free, home automation software. Home Assistant is super powerful and connects to all of my smart devices to a clean dashboard I created. And using plug-ins I'm running Uptime Kuma which is a self-hosted version of Uptime Robot for my Status Page. As well as Frigate for person detection in HA and recording like a NVR.

Underneath that, we have one running Ubuntu 20.04 with Immich and Portiner installed. Immich is a self-hosted Google Photos alternative, with the same UI, object detection and a mobile app for uploading photos. While Portainer is a Web UI for mannaging and creating Docker Containers. This is also the machine that runs this very Web Server!

At the top here we have My old Gaming Computer. Due to it having a graphics card, it became fit to host and encode my Plex Media Server. But that's not the only thing it's used for. Since it's running Windows Server 2019 I have an Active Diretory server for crediental mananagment across file shares and GPO's for some of my families computers. And with access to Hyper-V, its also hosting my reverse proxy and load balancer of choice, Kemp. Lastly it holds Veeam for backup and replaction to the ☁️ and between servers. (Oh and a Minecraft server 😀.)

After that, the big behemoth of the Dell R720. this is running TrueNAS Core with a total of 18TB in the ZFS Array, for Samba shares connected to the AD server for authentication. Right now, It doesn't have any Virtual Machines running, but I defentally have the compute power left in here with 24 cores and 90 GiB of ECC RAM.

Lastly we have a Netgear ReadyNAS which is strictly used as a local backup destination for the R720. And of course this does nightly backups to the ☁️ through Veeam.