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Man Cave Project

3

3one5

Gawd
Joined
Jan 6, 2005
Messages
579
I'm not sure if this is the place for it or not so tell me if it's not.

We just recently moved and I am in the process of getting my man cave / computer room together. This is slow going right now because I'm in the middle of a bunch of stuff at work that is consuming a majority of my time.

A month or so back I moved my server and data rack down to the basement. I don't know anyone near by so I got to do it on my own, loads of fun! A majority of that is in but now I need to get them wired together and then get a bunch of the house wiring done too.

This past weekend I gave my wife her sewing table back after buying a Ikea Galant corner desk. I was going to go with a Jerker again but ended up with the Galant. I had a couple jerkers at the past place but I sold one and took the other to work. Really nice desks but I think the Galant better suits my needs. I am now looking for another Galant with birch finish for the other side of the room. That is where I will put my build station, soldering station, etc.

I was also able to hit the container store in Denver this past weekend to pick up some tubs to start organizing in. For the past few years a majority of my little stuff has been stuffed in large rubbermaid buckets which made the stuff hard to find. I plan on picking up some sort of shelf to put the tubs on so all of my "junk" is readily accessible.

Here are a few pictures of the Ikea Galant and monitor arm. At this point I only have three 17" monitors to hang on it but that will be changing soon. I left enough room to go all the way up to 24" monitors though I think I may go with 22s.

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Here is the racks to the left of the desk. I tossed a desktop in the rack to get a firewall up and have not had time to get my servers in the rack. The futon in the picture is no longer there.

mc5.JPG


I will get more pictures as things progress. Tonight I may have the cable latter hung.
 
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I was able to get the monitor mounting pole cut down today. Forgot to buy a few lag bolts to get the cable tray up.
 
Here is a pic of the monitor mount with the pipe cut down a bit.

mc6.JPG


Home for the second Galant. Found another matching one and am trying to work a deal on it now.

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I made my way to Lowes today and picked up the needed hardware to get the ladder rack up. I have a 1000ft spool of ethernet cable coming so I can wire the patch panels in the racks together.

mc8.JPG
 
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Almost forgot, I have a USB Hub Desk grommet coming this next week. I'll able to run the monitoring wiring through there and it should clean things up a bit. I'll be out for some training in a week or so but it will put me close to an Ikea so I am going to grab some shelves and wire management while I am there.
 
Gotta love server racks in the home. Definitely one of my "to-dos" whenever I get around to buying a house :D
 
deff said:
Gotta love server racks in the home. Definitely one of my "to-dos" whenever I get around to buying a house :D
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I wanted racks for the longest time so finally I went looking on craigslist. In the beginning I bought far to much and ended up reselling it. I'm right where I need to be now. Now to get that custom name plate made for the front of the server rack.
 
Nice - brings back memories of central office install days - I even patented a cable rack cable puller for those kinds of horizontal cable racks, though it was far better suited for 100+ ft runs and not your 6ft?7 ft? you have. It looks like a single rack, so cannot be that much over 7 ft I would assume. I was fortunate enough to get my little 4 ft equipment rack in my office, my wife would have thrown a fit had I done all that - so live the dream for me man, I will be watching your thread.
 
The1stCAV said:
Nice - brings back memories of central office install days - I even patented a cable rack cable puller for those kinds of horizontal cable racks, though it was far better suited for 100+ ft runs and not your 6ft?7 ft? you have. It looks like a single rack, so cannot be that much over 7 ft I would assume. I was fortunate enough to get my little 4 ft equipment rack in my office, my wife would have thrown a fit had I done all that - so live the dream for me man, I will be watching your thread.
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LOL, thanks. The first time my wife saw racks in the house she wasn't happy. Then, she caught me hanging the ladder rack the other day and she gave me the disappointed Wife look. She is understanding about the whole thing and let's me do pretty much anything I want as long as the paycheck continues the increase :)
 
This morning I woke up to go and help a buddy do some emcom for a local bicycle race and he showed up with a box of cable. I spent the afternoon punching down the patch panels in the server rack and data rack.

Ethernet cut and ready to go.

mc9.JPG


Punching down the data rack side.

mc10.JPG


Cleaning up the Data Rack side.

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Then, because I only got 2.5 hours of sleep last night I started getting tired and quit taking pictures :) I'll have to get some of the ladder rack and such.

Yeah, there is a bit of dust there. I really need to get the wife down here to dust :)
 
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TechSoldier said:
Whats with the server setup at home? Can you explain?
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I host a lot of my own 'cloud' services such as email, website, blog, IRC, IM etc. I also use all of this for sand boxing and experimenting. Beyond that it's just fun and I can :)
 
Your not worried about the noise in your "man cave" at my job, my office is next to our server room naturally, and i can hear all our gear in there... granted we have a lot more switches and PoE switches so its louder, and it doesnt bother me, then again its in an adjacent room, your desk is in the same room as your racks.
 
Adam said:
Your not worried about the noise in your "man cave" at my job, my office is next to our server room naturally, and i can hear all our gear in there... granted we have a lot more switches and PoE switches so its louder, and it doesnt bother me, then again its in an adjacent room, your desk is in the same room as your racks.
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A majority of my gear is only on when sandboxing / experimenting. The 24/7 stuff is pretty quiet. Only one of me POE switches is on all the time.

One of these days when I build a house I am going to do things completely custom. My racks will be behind glass as equipment is meant to be seen not heard :)

Dream-Room_12.png
 
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I have the money, hardware and space to do something like this... but no damn time... love it OP.
 
Here is where it terminates in the server rack. Not real sure I am happy with the way this turned out so I may redo it.

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mannyman said:
looks good to me, I have seen worse.
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Thanks. I wanted to keep a bit of extra cable in case I had an issue with one of the runs or ever had to move the racks. I considered looping it up at the side of the rack but didn't want to interfere with the servers that will be going in.

Speaking of servers, I have a buddy that is giving me a MAC server. I am no MAC fan boy and have no idea what it will end up being used for but it will be cool to play around with and learn the OS and such.
 
not bad man, way nicer than the rack I have, which is tartus blue and almost as old as me!
 
haunter said:
not bad man, way nicer than the rack I have, which is tartus blue and almost as old as me!
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I went through a bunch of that kind of stuff myself. Finally I said screw it and spent some money on a decent rack. I say decent but I got a pretty good deal. The HP rack was $250 and a lot of the other stuff ran me $50 to $100.
 
schapman43 said:
Speaking of servers, I have a buddy that is giving me a MAC server. I am no MAC fan boy and have no idea what it will end up being used for but it will be cool to play around with and learn the OS and such.
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I have a bank of those things, and they are getting replaced ahead of time with PE R710's, FWIW.

;)
 
schizrade said:
I have a bank of those things, and they are getting replaced ahead of time with PE R710's, FWIW.

;)
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The server I am getting was also replaced by a Dell Poweredge server. I'm just looking forward to having a new piece of hardware to play with.
 
schapman43 said:
I went through a bunch of that kind of stuff myself. Finally I said screw it and spent some money on a decent rack. I say decent but I got a pretty good deal. The HP rack was $250 and a lot of the other stuff ran me $50 to $100.
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nice.

I found a few HP 42U's for 350, but they were 3 hours away, since I have a serviceble one, I figured it wasnt worth the trip

my stuff is an utter mess which only makes yours look that much nicer, and the room is circa 1983, and needs carpet and paint
 
Are you going to have a chair or couch and a TV or a mini fridge or Bar? Or is it just going to be a computer station type cave? Looks like lots of work going into it though... Wish you would have run the cat 5 at my old place of employment... it was rats nest.

Following this thread, very interesting stuff.
 
Mehphisto said:
Are you going to have a chair or couch and a TV or a mini fridge or Bar? Or is it just going to be a computer station type cave? Looks like lots of work going into it though... Wish you would have run the cat 5 at my old place of employment... it was rats nest.

Following this thread, very interesting stuff.
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Yes, large TV will be on the wall between the two desks. A couple chairs or love seat will go on the opposite wall. The mini fridge is in the utility room right next door.
 
Very cool, right now I have a stuffed chair and a small TV in my little man cave .. saving up for a bigger LCD and a mini fridge.

Really like what you have going on. People should post their man caves like you did be cool to see others.
 
Hey, see that 3d model of the house... what did you use to make that....

p.s. Man caves FTW
 
I am guessing sketch up which is pretty good if you have the time to give it
 
I thought I had another Galant all lined up today but it was the old style. I'm kind of getting sick of waiting and think I may just go down and buy a new one.
 
munkle said:
Nice man cave!
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Thanks!

Last night I made to ikea and bought a second galant, wire management and a bunch of other crap. You can't walk out of that place without a bunch of stuff you didn't plan on buying.

The desk is in, I'll grab some pictures once I clean up the mess I made.
 
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Things are slowly coming together.

This weekend I picked up a 40" LED LCD TV and mounted a piece of plywood to the wall under the ladder rack so I can install D Rings for routing the wire.

I didn't mount the LCD's because I have three 23" IPS monitors coming on tuesday. Unfortunately I will be out for the first part of the week in training.

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Oh yeah, I picked up a sweet shelf while I was Ikea too. Probably need to pick up a few more.
 
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