The Lanberg rack has arrived!

I've finally laid my hands on the 10'' Lanberg rack. It's a huge progress - finally, the homelab will feel more *professional* (whatever that means). It's also a challenge, since it's the first time ever I've been dealing with equipment of this kind. Nevertheless, it turned out that progressing from this...

... to this:

...was actually much easier than I had initially envisaged. For the initial build, it was enough to follow the instructions, put screws and nuts in the right places and just screw them down. Then it was time to install the shelves and the power supply at the bottom. Learning how the cage nuts actually work was enlightening - I had no idea that the wings need to be compressed in order that they fit into the square holes on the rack. Then they come in quite easily. How clever.

With the rack in place, I started arranging the hardware inside it. The top shelf for the MikroTik router, the middle shelf for the D-Link switch (I can finally use it, as new patchcords arrived). But my Thinkpad X230 was a tough nut to crack (pun not intended). It's not a piece of hardware that is easily placeable within a rack - server racks are not designed for laptops, even if we are dealing with a minirack and a minilaptop. However, as you can see in the picture, it fits quite well when it's placed sideways, or at least it looks quite good from the front: the depth of X230 seems to match the rack width. However, at the back the machine has a power cable inserted and it *barely* fits within the rack.

All in all, I think that I've made a huge step ahead. Now I feel like a more 'worthy' member of the homelabber community. But the rack itself appears so... empty. Still, I believe that the aesthetics of the rack can never be the deciding factor. I want to remain faithful to my minimalist philosophy and postpone buying more powerful hardware until I hit the wall with what I have right now. So far, I've bought only the rack, shelves, power supply, and patchcords specifically for the sake of this project. All of it was less then $100. The ThinkPad, router, switch - these items were in my closet for quite some time. Let's see how far we can get with this approach!