Get network cables with colors that coordinate with your company's branding.
Ask HN: How to make a photogenic server room
21–30 of 57 posts
Re: Ask HN: How to make a photogenic server room
#22Is it just one rack? Just get an enclosed rack and have your companies marketing people get a vinyl overlay printed for the front (ala the current Cray Supercomputers.)
Re: Ask HN: How to make a photogenic server room
#23Hire an actor to wander through the server room every so often wearing a black hoodie with the hood up, sticking cables and USBs into different parts of the equipment. Especially during security audits and investor meetings, but also during the CEO's all-hands meeting.
Re: Ask HN: How to make a photogenic server room
#24Apple at NAB 2007 is peak server room aesthetic to me. https://appleinsider.com/articles/07/04/19/high_quality_phot... All that gear is EOL now and can be picked up for cheap on ebay. Setup some xserves to just send data back and forth between Xserve raid arrays for maximum blinken lightsen
Really cool! Thanks for sharing. I miss Apple products from those years.
Re: Ask HN: How to make a photogenic server room
#25If you want some bling in your server racks you can add 1U and 2U multi-monitor displays and show status and/or visualization on small displays that most people aren't aware even exist:
https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/1U-2-Rackmount-LCD-Pa...
https://www.pimfg.com/product-detail/RACK-LCD-35-4
https://www.amazon.com/Blackmagic-Design-Smartview-Rackmount...
Re: Ask HN: How to make a photogenic server room
#26https://reddit.com/r/serverporn
Re: Ask HN: How to make a photogenic server room
#27Create a waterproof wall of glass around the room's glass walls, fill the between space with water and aquarium plants, put some fish. And in the server space proper, put a Cray in the middle, the one that looks like a 60s outer space couch, and hire a couple of str-- I think the fish will do fine.
Q: What kind of fish belongs in a server room?
A: A crayfish!
Re: Ask HN: How to make a photogenic server room
#28Yes, you can get blinky boxes from prop houses. They will cost too much, because they're usually rented by the day. Also try this recycling company.[1]
More usefully, just make everything tidy, and put a big screen or two, running some kind of status display, in there, facing the window.
Re: Ask HN: How to make a photogenic server room
#29salvage faceplates from a bunch of old suns and netapps and use them to cover all your modern gear!
put an atari console in the middle with a cartridge sticker with the name of your company on and a portable crt television with rotary channel dials rendering an 8-bit home computer era rendition of a grafana graph.
Re: Ask HN: How to make a photogenic server room
#30Additional information: nothing mission critical is in this room. Everything important is in another building. This room is almost completely decorative.
The coolest idea so far has been switches with loopback sfps - that's brilliant! We've got some decommissioned stuff that'd be perfect for that.