Hey mods, hope this is allowed as this isn't exactly my home, but it sure is a lab :)

I'm an 18 year old student of a secondary school in Hungary teaching IT, and from what I heard the school used to have a pretty good server park, but by the time I was accepted there in 2021 it was mostly gone, so I've put most of my spare time into getting some of that self-hosted awesome back in the school, and this was our biggest project so far, putting my solo 48 port repatch in second place.

  
A few other students, a school sysadmin (shout out to him, awesome dude) and I spent 3 days in total redoing the school's whole rack (in one of the buildings, one still left :D), moving our new and fancy ZTE rack into place replacing all the patch panels, and finally getting some metal in the rack.

  
HW list from top to bottom, the "good":

* Cisco EPC3925 docsis modem (backup 100Mbit line)
* Cisco C1113-P router & random ONT (govt. 1Gbit internet)
* 3x 24 port patch panel
* Cisco 2960X 48xGbit distribution switch
* Cisco 3560G L3 core switch (yeah, whole school runs off this)
* Fiber patch box
* Huawei eduroam router
* RETON something 8 port KVM (came with the rack, no way we could afford this :D)

The "bad":

* 2x Dell R610 each with 2x Xeon X5650, 96GB DDR3 ECC, 6x Kingston A400 120GB SSDs, running Proxmox 9 with ZFS RAIDZ2
* IBM x3650M3 with some E5xxx 4x/8t Xeons I had on hand and 24GB of DDR3, mainly a NAS machine (and Proxmox Qdevice) with 2x120GB A400, 5x 600GB SAS and 10x 300GB SAS drives.
* (back of rack, can't see) Another Cisco 2960X 48xGbit for the server network
* (bottom of rack, tower with blue LED, no rack case for it yet :c) i5-6400, 32GB DDR4 and some random SSD running OPNSense serving as the main firewall
* (behind the rack, in a 1000 year old HP desktop case, HW unknown) Windows Server handling DHCP and DNS for everything. (yes, I know, it's in the works to replace/virtualize it)

And the "ugly" is our power setup currently, running off a single Schuko plug cascaded into 4 (four) separate PDUs, **but!** there are already plans to get 2x32A service set up into the rack with a built in DIN-rail switchboard and rack mounted PDUs, just don't know when we can get some officially approved electric work done. In the meantime, we are also working on sourcing batteries for 2x APC Back-UPS Pro 1500's, those will be serving the network and server equipment respectively.

  
Now that we finally have school LAN accessible servers, we have a lot of plans for software, mainly a school-wide VoIP system using some Cisco SPA's, FOG server for imaging PCs, moving the school's website back to our own building from the cloud, and so on and so forth. Another huge thing for the future is to fix the current VLAN segmentation, I think all I have to say for you to get how bad it is right now is that the main network is a /16, lol. But of course it's never easy because we can't just bring down the whole school's network on school days, as that would result in me getting dragged across town by half the teachers in the school :)

  
Sorry for just the one picture, but we had already stretched our time frame 15 minutes beyond closing time on the last day just to get everything back online, and I could only snap one pic as we were leaving, but if the public demands to see the back of the rack (which I would have to label LabGore to be honest), I'll snap a few when break's over and i have to go back again.

And the last thing I feel the need to mention, all the great sponsors we have:

* None, we did this with what we found in the school, what we had at home, and what we could afford to pay for out of our own pockets

And now, for the final part, if you live in the EU/Hungary and could help out with anything you think would benefit us we'd gladly accept any discounts we can get.

Thank you for reading, all the best!

We're secondary schoolers running our school's network for free, and I finally have something worth sharing here!