physical spaces · systems
LAN & Server Closet
8TB of storage. A mix of solid state and spinning drives, powered by an Intel i5 chip perfectly suited for this application. Deep research went into curating the components—I wanted to build this box once and not worry about upgrading it for a long time.
The closet also serves as the central hub for all the home networking equipment, which is now rack mounted, and the termination point for hundreds of feet of ethernet wire run throughout the home. It’s important to understand physical infrastructure, and the fact that so much of our digital lives is stored in the cloud abstracts this away most of the time. But really, “the cloud” is a box like this one, scaled to a degree that’s difficult to understand.
Functionally, having an on-premise server is great for development work. I’m not bogging down any of my daily driver machines, and I can control how the network traffic flows, adding additional safeguards. I can spin up VMs and containers on Unraid whenever I need and quickly build test environments and sandboxes. Having this machine wired into the network has been a big unlock for my workflow—if you want to build something similar, let’s talk.
8TB
Storage
Dev cloud
Private, on-prem
Mid-build
Installed
