If it works for you then it's not crazy!

I remember someone here used the motherboard tray from an old case to mount his setup under a desk.
It was for somewhere "strange" like kitchen or garage which was why they didn't want a stranded case and the setup did make sense.

Few others have made cases out of cardboard boxes or wood (and made them look good) So I say go for it!

Well, proof of concept and extendable shelf installed in the bookcase, with space to spare on top.

Decided to leave a nice amount of room on the bottom for 2.25" drive bays and construct some sort of drive tray below, should be enough space to fit 6 x 5.25" bays in along with the frame to support it, for the removable storage side of life.

Got a new backplane on the way, with approx. 14 slots (ISA/PCI), which should fit on the shelf, when that arrives will move the power supply and 'front panel' around.

On the home lab side of life:
Compute side is sorted with the SBC, it has Windows Server 2000 in RAID (4 x 8GB Disk on Modules on a dedicated card) already setup, so can just (famous last words) transplant that to the new backplane.
Storage side, thinking of getting another RAID card, maybe with more than 4 slots (maybe 8? Then RAID it again), and doing what I did with Windows 2000 and installing Disk on Modules into it, so it is compact and efficient.
Network/Router side, will look at that later once the backplane and main setup are fully working, but should be easy enough to get multi port network cards
Lab side of life, not too sure yet, radio over TCP/IP, video, have a few ideas looking at the cards gathering dust in my collection, or a mixture of everything I can think of.

Not too crazy at all. My only concern would be buildup of dust over time. I've contemplated something similar myself - putting motherboards in drawers just high enough to fit the cards in. Unfortunately I never found the ideal set of drawers so I abandoned that idea.

I've seen even more eccentric things. This GA-7IXE board and attached peripherals hung on the wall was for several years the home server of a friend of mine:

dionb wrote on 2025-09-04, 13:43:

Not too crazy at all. My only concern would be buildup of dust over time. I've contemplated something similar myself - putting motherboards in drawers just high enough to fit the cards in. Unfortunately I never found the ideal set of drawers so I abandoned that idea.

I've seen even more eccentric things. This GA-7IXE board and attached peripherals hung on the wall was for several years the home server of a friend of mine:

The attachment servertje.jpg is no longer available

That setup is rather out there, I like it!

Dust is a concern on my mind, I was thinking when everything is in some sort of Perspex/acrylic cover, and maybe some fans with filters in the future.

The idea grows arms and legs:

1. 2nd WiFi card installed, so the 1st network card connects to the normal home network, the 2nd card allows access for older WiFi cards such as Aironet 350 which does not accept modern encryption methods and cannot connect to the home network.

The original plan was to be able to use WiFi in my NT 3.51 laptop which is still used but despite the Aironet 350 driver .INF file stating NT 3.51 Support, I cannot get it to work with, so back to plugging in the cable to access the home NAS.

2. 8 port raid card, just waiting on the drives then will setup the server further
3. Terminal services all setup and now can configure the server remotely, no need to keep plugging in the mouse, keyboard, monitor, etc...
4. Removed the 3dfx card, as it will go to waste here, plus gives me back a PCI slot
5. Have a digital I/O card installed for playing around with various things

The power supply in the photo is for testing purposes only, the backplane is all screwed in, there is still a lot of bits to do, such as attach rails to prevent the PCI/ISA cards from moving around and give them some support, cabling, front panel, etc. And, not even started on the drive bay area yet.

I like this idea!

I have once considered getting an industrial SBC with onboard NIC and alternative power connector(like molex), taping off the PICMG edge connector and mounting it in an existing home server. Could even build an internal serial null modem cable to connect to the server's main motherboard if both had a serial header.

I own 1 Tektronix TLA7012 portable mainframe and 1 TLA7016 benchtop mainframe where I live.
I also own 2 TLA7S16 serial analyzer modules (for PCI Express Gen 1 / 2)and 6 TLA7AA4 (2 of them are 450 MHz state speed models) as well.
I have one P6810 general purpose probe and a PCIe x16 interposer card to be used in conjunction with 2 TLA7S16s.
I will say that I own serious lab level equipment.

bracecomputerlab wrote on 2025-09-10, 09:10:

I own 1 Tektronix TLA7012 portable mainframe and 1 TLA7016 benchtop mainframe where I live. I also own 2 TLA7S16 serial analyzer […]
Show full quote

I own 1 Tektronix TLA7012 portable mainframe and 1 TLA7016 benchtop mainframe where I live.
I also own 2 TLA7S16 serial analyzer modules (for PCI Express Gen 1 / 2)and 6 TLA7AA4 (2 of them are 450 MHz state speed models) as well.
I have one P6810 general purpose probe and a PCIe x16 interposer card to be used in conjunction with 2 TLA7S16s.
I will say that I own serious lab level equipment.

damn, rather envious, but does give me an idea, pretty sure the digital I/O card I have had some software for voltage probes, etc. No idea where the kit and software are though. Not much movement on the bookcase retro home lab though, just sorting out fittings and connections at the moment. Also with any project, the solid state RAID has decided to die, so fault finding that.

Well this has been a nightmare recently, but some glimmers of joy. I had the operating system install on a 3Ware 3W-6410, (4 x 8Gb modules in RAID 10) and it has worked without problem for months up to this point. However, I knocked one of the power cables which stopped one of the modules, no problem I thought, RAID 10 can re-build. But no, Windows 2000 kept failing saying boot device error, so after lots of moving things around, still could not get it to boot.

In the end decided to just do a reinstall, which kept failing with Windows saying 'it cannot save the configuration data' (despite the additional drivers for the 3Ware card being installed at setup), now I have installed it before on this card with this configuration with no issue at all previously, nothing has changed. One thing I did notice which is odd, that after a reboot of the failed installation, either one or two of the modules would be marked 'Out of use', again whatever I tried Windows refused to install on the RAID (and seemed that the Windows drivers mucked it up).

So, gave up on the RAID and installed Windows to a CF Card, then installed the RAID drivers, and everything seems to be working perfectly, so at some point I will move the operating system off the CF Card back onto the RAID, but for the time being it can stay on the CF Card as that has wasted so much time.

Now to good news, for ages I wanted to set up a GPS timed NTP server, I saw articles about it years ago and had all the parts but never ever got round to it, or had an appropriate setup, so Pentium 3 bookshelf home lab, is doing its first real home lab stuff and receiving timings from GPS and setup as an NTP server!

Things are taking shape:

Two TP-Link TL-WN851N cards (1 for access to the home internet, 1 ad hoc to allow older none WPA2 devices to attach
One 3ware 3W-6410 RAID card, (4 x 8gb modules in RAID 10) for the operating system (maybe)
One Adaptec AHA-2940U2W SCSI, for attaching a SCSI tape drive for backups, and maybe more
One 3ware 7506-8 RAID 10, with 8 x 8gb modules for storage (not decided on how I am going to configure them yet, i.e. 2 arrays or 1 big array

Next steps:
Still to get multi port LAN card for the ability to connect older none WiFi devices to
Need to find a suitable PCI riser card, as the 7506-8 when populated with the 8gb modules, blocks access to a PCI slot, so need to move it slightly
Sort out the ISA side of life
Construct what is going to house the drives below the shelf.

I am doing something even more excessive, after scoring two 20u racks for free from work.

Maybe I should start a thread, even though it's not vintage gear exactly.