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Racking hardware
↩ Racks
Open a rack to see its elevation — the rack drawn as units, front and rear, with what's mounted where.
Front and rear
The elevation has two faces, and depth decides where something shows:
- Full-depth equipment appears on both faces, because it physically occupies the whole depth.
- Half-depth equipment appears only on the face it's mounted on. It's marked ½.
Looking at the rear and seeing a server you mounted at the front is correct, not a bug — it's marked as full depth to tell you so.
Zero-U equipment
Vertical PDUs and cable managers don't consume rack units. They sit in a side strip beside the elevation rather than taking up U space they don't actually use.
What can occupy a slot
| Type | Notes |
|---|---|
| Device / Server | Real monitored hardware, linked to its record. |
| Patch panel, PDU, Cable manager | Physical infrastructure. |
| Shelf | Can hold contents, listed inside it — useful for small items sharing one U. |
| Blanking | Blanking plates. |
| Reserved | Space held back. No equipment, but it still occupies its units and still clashes — which is the point of reserving it. |
| Label | Annotation. |
Racking something
Select a free unit on the face you want, and pick what goes there. You'll be offered:
- Hardware at this site that isn't already racked elsewhere.
- Anything without an asset record is listed separately, with the option to create one — rather than leaving you stuck.
You choose height in U and whether it's half depth at the point of assigning, because a machine's dimensions aren't recorded on its record.
Location comes from the rack
Once something is racked, any asset linked to it derives its location from the rack chain, with a link through to the rack. The free-text location field is the fallback for anything not racked.
This is the payoff: location stops being something someone types and then forgets to update when the machine moves.
Notes & tips
- Use Reserved rather than leaving a gap when you're holding space for known incoming hardware. A gap looks like capacity to whoever plans the next install.
- Shelves are the tidy answer to several small items in one U — put them in the shelf's contents instead of consuming separate units.