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.
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!).
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.
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.
I also had a Billy sat next to it, and did similar to this (but again not racked), with all of my AV gear inside. The door was great, it'd make any status lights diffuse and so they wouldn't interrupt watching a film in the dark (and my old Sky box used to have annoying blue LEDs with an animation when playing back a recorded show), but at the same time remote controls still worked through the glass. Literally best of both worlds. I cut a big hole in the back for cables, which also served well for airflow. I considered adding a fan, but never needed it. I suspect there would be issues with negative pressure doing that though.
The tops of the posts are still solid. You could mount a single rack unit and be okay, but fully populating lack legs is not recommended. Cute way to hide a network switch, though.
One really good alternative to racks is a flight case with integrated 4U / 8U rack. They're meant for musicians transporting audio equipment, so can be a lot expensive, but they're nice with front and rear panels that pop off, and are very portable. The bigger ones (12U and 16U) often come with wheels too which is nice.
I once worked in a hardware lab that used wire shelving for holding arrays of running machines, and a bad ground running through one chassis caused anyone who touched the shelf to get shocked by something very close to line voltage.
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.
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.
How in gods name this article made it to the front page of HN is a mystery.
They couldn’t even be bothered to get a good photo of it ffs.
https://wiki.eth0.nl/index.php/LackRack
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.
I also had a Billy sat next to it, and did similar to this (but again not racked), with all of my AV gear inside. The door was great, it'd make any status lights diffuse and so they wouldn't interrupt watching a film in the dark (and my old Sky box used to have annoying blue LEDs with an animation when playing back a recorded show), but at the same time remote controls still worked through the glass. Literally best of both worlds. I cut a big hole in the back for cables, which also served well for airflow. I considered adding a fan, but never needed it. I suspect there would be issues with negative pressure doing that though.
The rack itself won't hold electrostatic charge, and if the devices themselves want to be grounded they can be grounded through their power supply
And wood isn't that easy to get to burn unless you turn it into small particles first
I’m more worried about heat dissipation though.
It's a shelf and in the past few years it has not yet failed at holding my books.
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.