When I saw the pictures of "JustPlainJef"'s down-and-dirty installation, I had a "why didn't I think of that" reaction to his homebrew 19" racks. Figure 11 shows what you can do with some L-brackets and leftover 2 X 4's and sheathing.

Figure 11: A creative 19 inch rack
(click image to enlarge)

Jef noted that the cable management is a work in progress - he's since added cabling that uses 47 out of the 48 jacks on the patch panel - but everything works fine.

There are more pictures posted over at Jef's site if you'd like to explore more of his very pragmatic installation.

Figure 12: Data, phone and video distribution
(click image to enlarge)

Our thanks go to Chris, Mike and Jef, for sharing the fruits of their home-networking labors. For more tips, be sure to also check out the Forumz thread for the original series.

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