September 02, 2008, 3:51 PM — There is nothing quite like a period of intense application installation work to trigger thoughts about about a better world that might be out there, beckoning at us. It is the potent combination of frenetic activity, mind-boggling problems and frustrating waiting periods that does it. Lots of activity setting stuff up. Lots of weird problems along the way. And lots of thinking time waiting for stuff to load/install. Wrrrr. Click. Wrrrr. Click. The world would be a better place if only... Wrrrr. Click. Wrrrr. Click. "Please reboot your computer so that the changes can take effect"...
Thus it came to pass that I decided I want a rack of computers in my home office. It all started when I picked up a regular PC box to act as a general server/firewall box in my house. I was hovering over it in the computer store, admiring the flat screen monitor when I got to thinking "I don't need a fancy monitor". Alas and alack, the IT industry being what it is, cheap crufty old VGA monitors are becoming like hens teeth - in the chain stores anyway. I don't want to dedicate a monitor to it. In fact, I don't want to dedicate a mouse and
keyboard to it either. Too much clutter.
The dots joined up in my head. I bought just a box - no monitor - and a KVM switch. I'm happy with the setup. I have a nice big monitor with a comfortable keyboard and mouse. I switch machines by hitting a button on the KVM switch. Very nice. So nice in fact that I would dearly like to be able to take the idea further. The way I see it, PC motherboards are things that we should be able to stack on top of each other like so many shelving units and strap to a single KVM
switch. Let the hardware vendors make their margins by selling me a 4, 8, 16 or 32 motherboard setup - rather than pumping more and more goodies into single box offerings. I don't want 16 monitors, I don't want one machine with 32 GIG of RAM. I want 16 separate machines with 2 GIGs each.
I want the freedom to dedicate machines easily to particular tasks. I need one for fire-walling. Maybe one for print serving. Definitely one for multi-media. Maybe one or two for Windows variants. One or two for Linux variants. Definitely one or two for trying out new ideas in a
damage limiting way. I want to strap them all into my home network and strap them all to a NAS. In my minds eye I see a rack about 3 feet high, looking vaguely like a fancy stereo unit. Out of the back snakes a KVM switch setup. I sit at my desk flicking between my sixteen machines. Bliss...
Ok. What is wrong with that picture? Power is probably one thing. Noise might be another. Heat disappation. Are they all intractable? Maybe there is an insufficiently large market for SOHO racks. Perhaps.
In my minds eye I see a rack of Asus EE PC's, created by some enterprising developer with an itch to scratch. Maybe it will take something like that to cause SOHO PC racks to appear in the world.
I would buy one. Maybe I'm weird.
