Hey, Krafting’s here! I wish you all a happy new year and a lot of good things in 2025!

Today, I wanted to start 2025 by fixing one of the most annoying things in the world: Cables!

Table of Contents

The Context

Last year I purchased a 25U rack, and it has been serving me really well since then; however, I never bothered to make the cables actually look good. Well, I tried, but because I always need to plug and unplug stuff from the rack, I keep unused cables laying around, and they all get stuck in each other, and it’s just annoying to work back there… See for yourself:

It might not look like it, but there are too many unorganized cables back there. We have all the networking (2 per server), all the KVM cables (KVM stands for Keyboard Video Mouse, which is a way to plug multiple servers into a single screen/keyboard), all the power cables, and even more networking, as some of my servers are connected to each other with 10 gigabits/s cards.

The main issue is that the power strip is lying down on the ground, and it gets in the way of the networking and some KVM cables. Also, on this power strip there is some extra cable that plugs into it that has nothing to do with the rack nor the lab; keeping them separate will be a good way to clean all this mess.

So I bought something to fix this issue! Welcome to an upgraded power strip!

The Solution

A PDU with 12 C13 plugs and a power switch with a cover on. And a C14 plug for the power-in.
A PDU with 12 C13 plugs and a power switch with a cover on. And a C14 plug for the power-in.

As you can see, this is a 12-way 19″ rack-mountable power delivery unit (well, that’s a mouthful). With this, I hope to better manage all the power cables. And at the same time I’ll also try my best to fix the KVM cables mess back there.

I chose to mount the power strip at the back of the rack, of course, and here you see it mounted and turned on. I immediately plugged in a cable to power my main server to see if it worked fine, and indeed it worked!

The top of the back of the rack with the PDU installed between a few switches. Plugged in with a cable installed in it.
The top of the back of the rack with the PDU installed between a few switches. Plugged in with a cable installed in it.

Just before plugging everything else in and fixing my mess, I just want to talk about a small detail on this power strip that you might have noticed. A switch cover!

All the power strips I ever had never had any cover on the switch, and sometimes I wrongly clicked the switch (it happens to the best of us), and therefore I was turning off my whole setup… But no more! (kind of)

While working in the back of the rack, with the power strip laying on the floor, I had all the opportunities to make a wrong move and turn off the entire rack, but with this PDU at the top of the rack, with the power switch far away from everything and with a cover on it, I no longer have to fear turning off the whole rack!

I bought this PDU for just 29.50€. It is a kenable 12-way PDU that you can find on their official website here.

The build quality seems alright; it’s quite sturdy, and the power cable feels hard and thick. However, there were some small scratch marks on the PDU, but I guess this was just the packaging, as the packaging was really bare-bones with just a box inside a box with the PDU wrapped in a plastic bag.

The Execution

Okay, enough talking; now we need to take action! The PDU is installed, and I now have to migrate everything on it. For this, I got some 2m and 50cm C13 to C14 cables.

So I then removed all the old power cables from the rack. HOWEVER! My server was running, and I didn’t want to power it off, so I did a little trick and plugged one of its two power supplies into another outlet while removing the old cables and then switched back when all was done. I’m so glad I’m able to do that so I can still listen to my music on my Jellyfin library while working on the rack!

After removing all the power cables, the first thing I did was clean up all the KVM cables (photo on the left; you can see them with some Velcro going from the top of the rack to the bottom). I tried to keep them as organized as possible, but I need to be able to pull my server in front of the rack, so I kept some slack on all the cables, so it isn’t as perfect as it could be.

After that, I plugged in some power cables and plugged my server into the new PDU. In the photo on the right, you can see all the power cables I added; only two of them are separate from the rest; these two are for my server. I plugged in 4 cables, which are unused for now, but I’ll be able to plug them in wherever I want in the future. I don’t keep all my servers plugged in, as this is a waste of electricity, so I plug them in only when I need them.

Here is a closer look at the PDU and the KVM cables coming from the KVM Console:

I can clearly see the improvement! No, it’s not perfect; I can agree with you on that, but it’s way better than before and good enough for me. Here is a before and after comparison just for you:

The Conclusion

Overall, I’m quite happy with the new setup. I have way more outlets at the back of my rack now, and I can finally go behind the rack without fear of unplugging the wrong thing.

I can clearly recommend this PDU, as at the time of posting this article, and had no issue at all! Next time I’ll need to focus on the networking mess back there, and I might have a solution for that….

But enough spoilers. Thank you for reading me, and see you next time. 🙂

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