I had three old Raspberry Pis and an SSD sitting unused in a cupboard, so I decided to turn them into a small cluster of home servers. I wanted the finished setup to be compact and tidy enough to live on a little shelf in my television stand, rather than becoming another loose collection of boards, cables, and power adapters tucked away in some cupboard.

For the chassis, I joined two 12-inch server rack trays using a pair of small rack-mounting posts. This was cheaper than buying a premade desktop rack and gave me a reusable foundation: if I later expand the cluster or move it into a larger rack, the trays and mounting hardware can become part of the new setup.

I mounted the three Pis and SSD onto the trays, then added a small network switch and a compact USB power supply. A key goal was to minimise the wiring leaving the rack, so the single power supply runs every device inside it, including the switch, SSD, and Pis. This keeps the hardware easy to move and avoids a tangle of separate adapters behind the television.

The Pis currently run a Docker Compose monitoring stack built around Grafana and Loki, giving me a central place to inspect metrics and logs from services on my home network. They also host a Samba share for the media stored on the SSD, making it available to other devices around the house.

The completed rack now sits neatly on a shelf in the TV stand, where it connects directly to the router and stays out of the way. It gave otherwise unused hardware a practical home and left me with a small server platform that is organised enough for everyday use while remaining easy to expand later.