Racks¶

A rack gives your devices a physical home and draws an elevation — the familiar front/rear diagram showing what's mounted in each rack unit.

Add a rack¶

1. Open DCIM → Racks and click Add rack.
2. Name it and set its height in rack units (e.g. 42U) and starting unit (usually 1).
3. Optionally assign a site, a rack role, and tags.

Rack roles¶

A rack role classifies a rack's purpose (e.g. network, compute, storage) with a color, so racks group visually. Define them on the Rack roles page — like everything else, none ship by default.

Mount a device in a rack¶

On a device (or in the rack), set:

• Rack — which rack it's in.
• Position — the lowest rack unit it occupies. The dropdown lists the rack's real units (top-down, matching the elevation); units that are already taken are greyed out and show the blocking device, so you can only pick a spot where the device actually fits.
• Face — front or rear (leave blank for full-depth gear that occupies both).
• Side — only for half-width device types: which half of the U (left/right).

The device's height comes from its device type, so the elevation knows how many units to fill. Danbyte checks the device actually fits — it won't let you mount a 2U device where only 1U is free, or overlap two devices on the same face.

Half-width devices¶

Some gear is half a 19″ rack wide — e.g. a Mellanox SN2010 ToR switch — so two mount side-by-side in a single U. Mark the device type as Half width (next to its U height), and each device of that type then picks a Side (left or right) when racked. Two half-width devices may share a U as long as they're on opposite sides; a full-width device still claims the whole U. The elevation draws the halves side by side, and a shared U counts once in the rack's used-units figure.

Rack elevations¶

The rack's Overview draws NetBox-style paired elevations — front and rear side by side — and the Devices tab keeps a single toggleable one. Three display modes:

In Images and Render modes a Text tick toggles the name overlay, so a photo-real rack stays clean when you want it to.

Depth-aware faces: a device mounts on one face, but if its device type is full depth (the default) it occupies the other face too — the opposite view draws it hatched (diagonal stripes), so the rear elevation shows exactly what's blocking the space, NetBox-style. Mark shallow gear (patch panels, half-depth switches) as not full depth on the device type and it frees the other face.

Elevations follow the rack's width (10″ / 19″ / 21″ / 23″) — a 10″ lab rack draws narrower than a 23″ telco rack, and Images/Render modes use true 1U proportions so photos aren't squashed. Occupied units fill edge-to-edge and take the device role's color in Names mode.

On a rack's own page you can drag device blocks between units — drop a block on an empty band and the device re-mounts with that band as its top U (occupied space, rack edges and half-width columns are respected; a plain click still opens the device). The PNG button snapshots the front + rear pair for a change ticket or wiki page.

Racks roll up power: supply is every primary power feed delivered to the rack (volts × amps × max-utilisation%, three-phase × √3), demand is the racked devices' power-port draws — allocated where you've recorded it, otherwise the nameplate sum (labelled as such). The rack page shows demand / supply W and turns red when over.

Racks can carry a weight budget (max weight + unit on the rack form — the floor or rack load rating). Every racked device's type weight sums against it, normalised to kg; the rack page shows used / budget and turns red when over. Types without a weight contribute nothing, so the number is a floor, not a guarantee.

Racks can carry a location (building / floor / room within their site) — the Locations page's Rack elevations button then shows exactly the racks in that room, and /api/racks/?location= filters likewise. A location can also be drawn as a floor plan, with tiles linked back to its racks.

Every device's own page shows its rack with the device highlighted.