Server drawer

This is as good a time as any to give a quick tour of my “homelab” or server drawer.

The external view is rather innocuous: A visually inoffensive Nest Wifi, a rather elegant Nest Thermostat (shame that the display can’t be always-on), and the gorgeous Nintendo Switch dock cover my partner got me. The TV aerial is tucked to the back, a reasonable compromise between “gets reception” and “hidden away and ugly”. The TV is mounted on upside-down IKEA boxes which we painted to roughly match the rest, hiding some botched carpentry behind the TV.

You may note some cables heading down through a hole in the woodwork (yeah, I could probably make them a bit neater on the way down):

When opened, the drawer shows the Virgin Media router (in Modem Mode), hooked up to the Nest Wifi and back into a small switch. The TV is hardwired in, and so is the NUC i3 media server (“Michael”, replacing the previous server “George”). The NUC is wearing a 4TB USB HDD as a hat. Everything is quite low-powered, and Michael usually hovers around 42°C.

Finally, here’s how everything is powered. The guy who built it thought 10 sockets (8 in the drawer, 2 behind the TV) was overkill. It was not.