Discussion
Rubenerd
Kenji: Nice fire safety and grounding. Wood is ideal for both. They should build data centers like this.
tokai: That shelf is more glue and fire retardant than it is wood. Its also really bad as a book shelf so it might still be superior in this role than the intended one.
wongarsu: How exactly do you envision this going wrong?The rack itself won't hold electrostatic charge, and if the devices themselves want to be grounded they can be grounded through their power supplyAnd wood isn't that easy to get to burn unless you turn it into small particles first
avian: As a current user of the said item of furniture I'm curious what makes it really bad as a book shelf.It's a shelf and in the past few years it has not yet failed at holding my books.
jl6: What you’re really here for is the Lack Rack:https://wiki.eth0.nl/index.php/LackRack
pch00: I really don't want to be too much of a downer, but is this really just an HN post about someone putting something on a shelf?
voidUpdate: I mean, you can probably reduce any HN article to something that doesnt sound worthy of being on there if you want
relaxing: Sure, but this truly is just about putting a motherboard on a shelf.They couldn’t even be bothered to get a good photo of it ffs.
layer8: Reminds me of the LACK that is/was commonly used for server racks: https://www.google.com/search?udm=web&q=lack+rack
GJim: You're not wrong.How in gods name this article made it to the front page of HN is a mystery.
criddell: Bots are in to stuff like this.
nerdjon: I keep wanting to build this but I have seen people talking online that they changed the legs and they are now hollow and not really suitable for this.That has made me very cautious to use this for any serious amount of mounting.Edit: Apparently there is a section on that page about it, but does not give a ton of confidence that it won’t give me a lot of issues.
ralferoo: I have an old Lack (20 years) and while I've never used it as a rack, it'd just been retired from under the TV as I got a new one with a wider base. I notice that even though it's never been moved much, it doesn't feel very stable any more and I wouldn't trust it with a rack of heavy equipment, especially with HDDs that could suffer catastrophic failure if they fell. That said, attaching brackets would sure up the legs a bit. Ideally you'd want to attack brackets at the back as well I guess.
pwg: Because enough readers upvoted it to cause it to appear there.
GJim: You <-----> The Point.
JKCalhoun: The mobo collectors are going to have to fight the vinyl enthusiasts for IKEA's Billy shipments.
shagie: It depends on the loading. If you've got it 9-12" high apart and are putting paperbacks on there... that shouldn't be a problem.However, when the shelf becomes multiples of that, then people start putting hardcover volumes or laying the book flat and stacking them high within the shelf.It won't necessarily fail, but it can substantially sag with heavier loads.This is an issue for boardgammers who are after larger and heavier shelf spaces which is why the Kallax shelving is much preferred. I'll also note that Ivar shelving is solid wood rather than particleboard.
kotaKat: If the 486es were running OpenClaw then everyone would be losing their minds.
dylan604: I've mentioned this before, but my first CoLo server was from a friend that built servers for a good sized hosting company back in the late 90s. He built it from spare parts but had no case for it. He hung the mother board against a dry erase board from the mounting holes with zip ties. He had a PSU sitting on his workbench with cables feeding up to the mobo. IIRC, the hard drive was suspended on the wall as well. In that vein, anything can be a "rack" if you squint at it hard enough and maybe tilt your head a bit.
cm2187: Your friend founded OVH?
iso1631: 16 points in 2 hours?
paganel: What can I say, I'm a Billy simp, there's one just behind me as I'm writing this comment and for about a year now I've been forcing myself to buy a new one to put it on the right-side of my current desk (sometimes I'm too lazy for my own good, as in this case). So just seeing Billy in the title and as the actual subject of the blog-post made me upvote the submission, apparently I'm not alone in this.
chairmansteve: Well, you know how messy most hackers are..... my mom would like this article.
jonlucc: Are Billy deep enough for vinyl? It looks to me like they're only 11.75" deep, not 13.
JKCalhoun: Yeah, looks like the KALLAX is preferred, the BILLY does leave a bit of album hanging out. (Although I don't believe you need all of 13" for an album sleeve—perhaps closer to 12½". Still overhang though.)
bombcar: LackRack is cute in that it works and fits, but the real home datacenter is wire shelving - one of THOSE bad boys can support hundreds of pounds AND have good airflow (and sneaky cable routing!).
saalweachter: If you trawl auction sites for business liquidations, you can also usually pick up an actual rack for pennies on the dollar.It doesn't even have to be a tech business; most random offices have a small rack in a closet somewhere with some networking equipment on it, and the whole thing usually sells as one lot to anyone with $50 and a screwdriver to remove the equipment from the site.
bombcar: They're not hard to find as you say (you can even find them at scrap yards and such) - though then you can find the fun of getting the right mounting hardware to actually PUT things in the rack (and you get to learn the difference between telco racks (very common) and server racks (somewhat less common).
saalweachter: If you've accidentally purchased a telco rack it won't be ideal, but modifying it into a server rack is going to yield a better rack than a coffee table or bookshelf.
bombcar: Yeah for a lot of things these days I actually prefer a telco rack, as you’re unlikely to be shelving giant rack mount chassis and UPS as much as you used to.
netsharc: There's a version of Billy that is deeper (39cm = 15.35in), but maybe only in some regions: https://www.ikea.com/gb/en/p/billy-bookcase-white-90401932/
vidarh: I cofounded an ISP in the 90s, and our first bank of 16 modems were mounted to a panel on the wall by clamps attached to their serial cables.
relaxing: Any ideas on that mystery, then? Since you’ve got your finger on the pulse around here.
pwg: There's no mystery. The way any story makes the front page is enough users upvote it from the "new" page for it to appear there.So the answer to the question of "how did it make it there" is exactly what I said, enough upvoted it that it made it to the front page.As to "why" those folks upvoted it, well, on that I have no idea.
relaxing: No I already knew you have no idea, that’s no mystery.
marginalia_nu: I swear every year that passes it sounds more plausible that IKEA has a bunch of people chewing on wood and putting it together into furniture like they were building wasp nests. Their stuff makes frickin' papier-mâché look like a steel girder in comparison.
blacksmith_tb: Ironically, the Lack's top is made of a cardboard honeycomb laminate that looks quite a bit like a wasps' nest in fact: http://www.imajeenyus.com/optical/20131206_xray_ikea_vhs/ind...
