Reorganizing our server shelf

TL;DR: With some planning and tinkering, you can fit a lot of hardware in a small space.

In Dutch homes, the meter cupboard (called a "meterkast" in Dutch) is a small closet, usually placed directly behind the front door. It houses the electric meter, gas meter, water meter and the circuit breakers. In our case it is also the entry point for the internet with an (ADSL) telephone line, and more recently two glass fibers (yes we can choose 🤷).

The top shelf of our meter cupboard is the perfect spot for our family's little 'data center'. The only downside is that it is small; it measures 18cm/7" high, 75cm/30" wide and 30cm/12" deep. The challenge is housing all our electronics there: our home server, an entry-model Synology NAS, the internet modem, an ethernet switch and all the cables and power adapters, including those for our wifi access points.

Since we switched from ADSL to fiber, it was a good moment to reorganize. Our internet provider (Freedom, highly recommended) supports bring-your-own internet modems. The default provided AVM Fritz!Box is quite large. Since our switch and wifi acces points are from Ubiquiti anyway, I bought the Unifi Cloud Gateway Ultra. It is very small and at €94, it is cheaper than the Fritz!Box 5590 which costs €180 through Freedom or €225 through a retailer. The Fritz!Box does come with smart home and DECT phone support. We don't need a smart home, but we do want DECT. To fill the gap, we found a secondhand Grandstream DECT/VoIP server with two handsets for just €50 on Marktplaats (our old handsets needed to be replaced anyway).

Although the internet modem, ethernet switch, and DECT/VoIP server are small, they still need to be stacked to save space. For this purpose I designed a small rack. Snijmeesters, a cutting shop in my city, laser-cut it from 3mm birch wood.

Here you see the parts.

Here you see the rack being glued together. To keep the sides straight and make it easy to remove any spilled glue, I used two glass containers.

And here is the result. It is quite sturdy, sturdier than I had imagined.

Using your own internet modem had one unexpected consequence. To convert from fiber to ethernet, you need an ONT. Freedom provides a Huawei EG8242H ONT for this purpose. It turns out that this ONT is a very large box! Making room for it on the shelf would have been difficult. However, since the provided fiber was not long enough anyway, it now hangs lower in the meter cupboard. I tried to find a smaller alternative, but it is hard to find a compatible product at a decent price. In the end we left it like this.

Here is our updated server shelf. The new rack is on the left. We have had it place for a couple of weeks now without any problems.