I just wanted to write down some of the things that led to the cratacenter. My co-workers and I worked out of co-working spaces from Aug 2014 - Sept 2020. We had some virtual private servers out on the internet we used to run some of our infrastructure but had an idea to run more. I bought some refurbished mac minis and put VMware ESXi on them and attached them to some storage on an 12U rack next to my desk.

I then bought some shelves and 3D printed some vertical stands for the mac minis.

As money permitted, I'd add a node to the cluster

The mac minis were limited to 16GB of RAM and that became a problem so we found some Supermicro E2000-8D Servers that were a similar form factor to replace them.

I wanted to see if we could get some redundant firewalls going so I got two net-6501s with lan1841 boards from Soekris Engineering and put them together in an OpenBSD CARP configuration.

One problem with this is that when we moved co-working spaces, it was a real hassle to un-plug everythingand get it re-cabled.

Meanwhile, I took the old hardware to my apartment and started a second build-out (for lack of a better term) there.

Eventually I moved it into cubby holes. This was the first proto-cratacenter.

But then we had the idea about making it portable. I got a couple medium sized crates and put the UPS and NAS in one, the routers and servers in the other

I didn't like the need for the second crate. While it was portable, it was difficult to move around. So I ordered two large crates. The second crate works as a lid, and as a dolly (as it has casters, but they fit in the other crate when using as a lid.) And everything is self contained. Only one power cable and one (or two, for redundancy) uplink cables leave the crate.

This made for a super-portable setup that could just get rolled to the garage, tossed in a trunk and relocated.