@lattera ooof

@jfmezei Raised floors are still very much a thing... no hard rule about how to arrange HVAC/power/data. Frankly it's religious.

I'm indifferent to AC power location and raised floors, but data and -48VDC should be up, and I'm a proponent of cold-aisle containment, rather than hot aisle containment.

If it's on slab, everything's from the top. Most facilities I'm in are simply hot/cold aisles, no containment.

I've yet to have an elechicken do the lighting the way I want in the facilities I design: vertical light strips on the wall at human-height. Sure - It's hard to look down the aisle, but it's really easy to see inside the rack.

@jfmezei Of course the racks existed; when did standard computers in a 19" chassis become popular/common? I contend around Y2K when the internet boomed. For example, when I was at Nortel in 1997-2000 we were struggling to get rackmount PCs at all.

Gobs of lab equipment and some switching/patching was 19", I know in A/V 19" rack gear was common too. But 23" or proprietary cabs still ruled telecom, which is what Internet came from.

re: dimensions - I have modern HP Proliant servers that don't fit in my datacentre rack in Montreal with the rails. about 3mm too wide. Can't even bend the margins to make it fit. Pathetic.

Wanna talk about mounting? 10-32 is The Original telco size bolt, however square-hole with cafe-nuts are definitely the most flexible - and reparable if you strip a thread. I tend to make all my racks M6 (with Quadrex bolts), occasionally 10-32 just to use up the stockpile, but it annoys me. I also have 5-20, M5 and a few other sizes of bolts in my rack-bolt kit.

@ottaross and the cable managers have the wrong number of fingers, several of which will (inexplicably) be teeth, and sometimes a a can of WD40.

@kithrup The #FreeBSD handbook is a great resource for starting with anything FreeBSD: https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/developers-handbook/kernelbuild/

@Alphacheez @xinmyname @caseyliss depends how picky the EVSE or EV is; if you're running on 208V commercial power for example (120V to neutral, but 208V phase to phase), you don't often _have_ a neutral available - so wide-input devices shouldn't be checking for a neutral-ground bond if one cannot exist.

@vpermar @caseyliss My #F150Lightning with a cheap Vevor EVSE had no trouble on an inverter type generator... but that's a good thought.

@xinmyname @caseyliss extending that correct assertion, the L14-30 twistlock on the right can be adapted to what you need. In Canada, Princess Auto would probably have it, so I guess Harbour Freight down there?

@jfmezei our notion of standard 19" rack computer equipment really only emerges in the late 1990s. I think the only modern exception to the bare rack might be @oxidecomputer.

https://www.vertiv.com/en-ca/products-catalog/facilities-enclosures-and-racks/racks-and-containment/vr3150/

This is my go-to rack, where most people get 24" cabinets, barely wider than the 19" mounts, I get these 'monster' 31" cabinets so the cable management is pretty.

In the attached photo, I used the Ubiquiti 2U PDUs, but they're only suitable for 12A, and I really don't like switching PDUs since they dramatically increase the points of failure. I also, ironically, didn't need the width for any cable runs... but I never regret having it.

@jfmezei usually empty but a few include very basic power bars.

This setup we're doing a pair of 30A UPSes, so 4x 0U (aka vertical) PDUs - A/B for each rack.

@jfmezei that's the point of every brochure.

Just bought a couple 42U 19" rack/cabinets... they're "AI Optimized", which I think means marketing has optimized the brochure for the AI grift.