MiniRack Build Out And Review
Seems like in the last year or two home networking folks have started building up MiniRack Home Lab servers. A typical network server rack is 19″ and the minirack form factor is 10″.
My build is inspired by Jeff Geerling. Jeff is a Tech Guy who specializes in all things Raspberry Pi. Anyone who owns a Pi probably knows about him. Essentially, my build will consist of 3 Raspberry Pi computers and a JetKVM.
- Raspberry Pi 4 with POE+. – An MMDVM board is used as a gateway for DMR Ham Radio.
- Raspberry Pi 5 with GeekPi POE+ and 256GB NVME Hat. Additionally, a HiFiBerry DAC8x Digital to Analog converter for streaming audio. Lyrion Music server and Squeezelite and deployed.
- Raspberry Pi 5 with the same Geekpi POE+ and this NVME houses a 4TB NVME drive with Samba. Also, it has a mini RTL-SDR for running OP25 which is a P25 Phase 1 and Phase 2 decoder. I use it to track two trunking communications systems. (Police Scanner)
- JetKVM – used to control the Pi with the 4TB drive. Lastly, KVM stands for Keyboard, Video, and Mouse and is similar to IPMI accessibility.