Home routers and cable modems are now extremely powerful devices, but they all suffer from the attention of their manufacturers’ design and marketing departments. Instead of neatly packaging them in functional cases, they impose aesthetics and corporate identity on them, usually resulting in a curvy plastic case that’s difficult to integrate with other network infrastructure. [The Eccentric Workshop] did something about this with their new Arris modem, by creating a new 19″ rack mount for it.
Unusually for such a device, the plastic case was easy to dismantle. There’s a PCB inside, and a light guide for its LEDs. A new lower-half case and light guide were designed and 3D printed, and the whole was then mounted in a 1U rack case. The special part of this hack perhaps lies in the front panel, a very professionally cut and laser etched affair complete with an Arris logo as though it were meant to be this way.
We also like having our infrastructure and other things in a rack here at Hackaday, and fondly remember the days when some surprisingly affordable boxes came with metal wings for rack mounting. It’s always possible to use a rack tray, but something like this is so much more attractive.
It’s got to be said, I do like a nice rack.
Especially when it’s all neatly tied up and organised
I see what you did there. 😁
a few months ago they forced a modem upgrade on us. the old modems were a tiny little box that fit nicely in one small corner of the networking cabinet. the new one is a massive monstrosity with built in wifi you cant turn off. i just wrapped it in tin foil and shoved it in at a weird angle so it would fit. what do you mean its supposed to have ventilation?
seriously hands off my side of the wan port.
Depending who your ISP is (and probably not comcrap), you can ask for a modem-only. You’ll likely have to go through several layers of script-reciting support drones/AI bots, but it can be done. I have a modem-only for new Internet-only residential service from Spectrum aka Charter cable (in Midwest USA).
Comcast isn’t great, but they do allow me to bring my own modem, no Wi-Fi, for my data only service. Honestly, Comcast is not quite as bad as our power company monopoly.
“support drones / AI bots”… hmmm
It was almost the end of the 90s. Cable internet finally reached my neighborhood. Having previously been spoiled on the college dorm ethernet before spending a year in an apartment back on dialup I was very excited.
I had to have a Windows computer for the installer to set things up. Not a problem at first, I had roomates, home routers weren’t a thing yet and we used a product called Wingate running on Windows98 for internet connection sharing. But it wasn’t long before Wingate was replaced with a more appropriate Linux PC. And I wanted to host my own services on it too, which of course the cable company had a rule against.
I ignored the rule and started hating the cable company for their Windows/Mac only support and for trying to keep people that wanted a “real” internet node with their own services down.
Then one day I received an email from the cable company regarding my email server. Oh, shit, it’s finally happening. They must be giving me an ultimatum, stop the servers or lose internet. Nope! They were suggesting some settings changes to improve security. And they gave me a URL to go to that would trigger a re-scan and let me know how I did.
These guys weren’t kicking me off their service for running servers. They were being helpful! I liked them!
Then the local cable company was bought out by a big corp which you would know the name of. Same rules in the user agreement, no servers, no Linux or router support. No more helpful tip emails. Still didn’t shut us off for violating those rules though. Eventually I did have to stop serving my own email. That was because the big spam blacklists became a thing and they just blacklisted entire cable modem ip ranges by default. There wasn’t really anything to be done about that.
So then I graduated. With a degree in Computer Science. Right as the dot com bust occurred. What great timing! Where to work…
I ended up getting a job answering the phones for that big cable corp, doing internet support. Day 1 I still hated the fact they discouraged using computers running different OSs or using our own routers. Day 2 I understood and agreed!
We had 100s of people in those offices. When I was interviewed they asked technical questions and were looking for technical people. But that didn’t mean they had 100s of qualified network engineers handling their phones! That’s not practical!
We did have some great people though. But even great people don’t know every possible system.
Sure, the user agreement said things like you must have a Windows or a Mac PC to connect to your modem and do not run servers. But nobody actually cared! It wasn’t really about that. It was about not having some angry customer on the line expecting someone to hold their hand, walking them through some random Linux distro or some random router config screen blind over the phone. That little bit we did support, we had to do it without seeing your screen. Any one of us could walk you through that narrow list of supported software with our eyes closed!
It wasn’t that you couldn’t do your own thing. It was that when you tell people they can do their own thing they turn into assholes expecting you to support it! If someone wanted to run Linux or their own router… cool. So long as they could support it themselves. But if you told them it was allowed… then they became support demanding assholes!
We were actually pretty good. A lot of us could have walked you through a lot of that stuff. But we didn’t. Why? Well for one we were forbidden from doing so, were randomly monitored and could be fired. But really, it didn’t take long to realize what problem that would cause. Say I received a call from a Linux user. Hey.. this user is using Debian. So was I at the time. So I walk them through stuff. Next time they call and get my friend. My friend has never used Debian, my friend uses Suse. The customer gets irate when they can’t help. And believe me, they did get irate!
We did not do that to one another. We did not want it done to us. I would have had no idea where Suse stores it’s settings if my friend had helped someone in a previous call!
But the customers are never really happy. And neither is the corporation. As our office grew we took over, deprecating a third party contractor out of Canada that was previously used. Now those contractors were useless. Every time… unplug your modem. Ok, wait 1/2 hour, plug it in and call back if it isn’t working. That’s all they ever did! By luck a call would eventually get routed to us and that customer might have already been through that process 5 or 6 times! Then we would actually fix their problem. And yet.. the customers were disappointed when they didn’t get the Canadians. They said they loved them because they were so polite.
Now I am telling you… we were kissing the customers’ asses with every call. I can’t for the life of me figure out how one could be more ‘polite’. Maybe it was the accents? Some of us would play with different accents and it did make a difference in how the customers responded. Hey.. you can only walk so many people through POP and SMTP settings in Outlook Express so many times before you get bored and a little goofy.
Couple this insistence we were not polite enough with the fact the company wanted to squeeze every possible drop of profit out of everything and change was coming.
They wanted all our support people to start turning support calls into sales. Are you kidding… customer calls in PISSED that they haven’t had their porn fix in 3 days and you are expected to get them to spend more money on that same call?!?!
So they stopped asking technical questions and looking for technical backgrounds in interviews. They switched to a more sales oriented hiring approach.
So yah, you might get someone useless now. Well, useless sells. If people weren’t buying that, if they instead put their money where technical competency is that is what the market would provide! Blame the consume in the mirror!
Eventually I did get out and began my career actually using my degree. I kept touch for several years with people who stayed. It just kept getting worse. Eventually they closed the office and went back to the outsourcing companies.
Hell, it might actually be AI now. Although.. only if AI can keep it’s sales numbers up… on support calls!
I told the story of my own encounters with cable-company phone firewalls recently @ The Register:
https://forums.theregister.com/forum/all/2025/03/17/microsoft_bug_report_troll/#c_5037827
Suffice it to say, things have not improved.
[support drones/AI bots]
Obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/806/
My brothers ISP did that with no modem only option. You can enable bridge mode but you cannot turn off wifi no matter what. Since I had a unifi ap setup for him this was just eating airwaves so I literally took it apart and removed all the antenna and clipped off the board mounted antenna elements. I told him them may make him pay for it later for damage but chances are it will obsolete first.
I really dislike this MO as it just eats up the airwaves with wifi some people don’t even want or use.
I do love a massively over engineered solution.
It’s always the dudes with Ubiquiti gear thay do this.. I suppose is in the spirit of this site and I love an over engineered solution as much as the next guy, but I dont get the foaming over a mini rack with some network gear on the wall in your living room like its a Monet painting or something.
Hey, don’t kink shame them. Some people like artwork that looks like a toddler was let loose on a canvas, others like blinking led lights that show how much data they’re pumping through while watching Netflix. To one’s own. But we should celebrate their willingness to share their journey with us.
ahm
https://www.reddit.com/r/cableporn/
I think, like many hobbies, the fact that most people don’t “get it” is part of the appeal to those involved. But I also don’t think there’s really anything to get – other than that a lot of people enjoy doing things for the sake of doing them, and a certain subset of those people choose to go all out when it comes to specific things.
Do the vast majority of people, even tech-oriented people, need any sort of rackmount hardware in their home setup? Probably not. But it gives its adherents something specific that’s fun to tinker with and is backed by a comparatively small, more closely-knit group of enthusiasts.
It’s like people who’re really into building their truck for rock crawling even though a lot of them barely even leave the pavement. Or people who install Gentoo Linux to compile everything from scratch, even though most of the time perfectly good binary packages exist.
Also, “dudes with Ubiquiti” is definitely a thing, but I think it’s just because Ubiquiti makes rackmount gear that has a distinct aesthetic, has a somewhat intuitive management interface, and (probably most important) their stuff is affordable enough that you can build a home network out of it.
I don’t know of any other company that makes affordable rackmount gear (with the possible exception of Mikrotik’s fancier switches and routers) unless you want to build everything out of generic linux/freebsd servers or extremely outdated used pro gear from someone like Cisco.
(and Ubiquiti has plenty of good options across their lineup that don’t require rack mounting, so in general I suspect that people decide they want to have a rack first, then fill it with Ubiquiti gear, rather than vice versa)
People with more money than sense. I use ubiquiti APs but for network gear, used enterprise IT gear offers more features, more learning opportunities, and better bang for your buck. caring about the aesthetics of a network rack beyond good cable management is silly IMO.
Some racks can look nice.
https://www.falcon-nw.com/desktops/rak
More serious comment, it pains me to see the state of the Comms racks at work because they’re an utter mess and that alone causes problems because people dig into them and dislodge stuff, plus, nobody should have access without having to get permission and log their reasons, changes, additions, removals etc.
And, whilst keeping them neat is an art, they aren’t art and have no place in my living spaces or on display at my place of work (a battle I have fought and won) not least because letting people see what gear you’re running and possibly work out how it’s connected is a security risk
“letting people see what gear you’re running and possibly work out how it’s connected is a security risk”
Ehhhh… I mean, there’s a sense in which that’s a tautology, of course, because having any information about anything always makes that thing more vulnerable than having no information about it. QED.
But security through obscurity is rarely very much security at all. Really, if merely knowing those kind of surface-level details of a network compromises it, then you have bigger problems because it was never actually very secure at all. In an IDEAL world, a secure network is no less secure even if all the details of its configuration are publicly available. Which is not to say that we actually live in such an idealized reality, of course.
(“Security” is also a popular bullshit excuse many companies give for not providing access to their source code. And yet, time and time again vulnerabilities in closed-source software — vulnerabilities that could’ve been caught by a careful review of the source code — are discovered and exploited despite even without access to the oh-so-“secure” code.)
Ubiquiti has had this for awhile works great
Heck, just take any random router, pull the plastic case off, mount in a rackmount box and extend the cables and LEDs to the front panel. You can do the same with a cable modem. You’ll be the only one in the neighbourhood with one.
I like this project. My new modem is much faster, but is awkwardly shaped and doesn’t have wall mount holes. I’ll try replacing the base. I keep meaning to add a new shelf on the wall with my utilities, but just swapping part of the housing with a printed part is a great idea.
Oddly the router my fiber provider gave me has a screw insert in the bottom.
You should probably try reading and understanding what you are writing….you are talking about “Home Modems”, why in the hell would some random house wife who just wants to watch Netflix give a damn about a rack mount? Absolute garbage, like 95% of the trash that comes out of self proclaimed “tech bloggers” these days.
I wish they’d come up with a smaller footprint standard for home oriented gear like this. Not 19″ but maybe 150mm squared. So you can combine your own modem, router, home nas and AP and stack them nearly.
I don’t have room for even a partial vertical rack, just a shelf in a closet with circulation fans mounted through the door.
It’s a mish mosh of cases in different sizes shapes and general orientation. Beyond this, the mix of power, led or controls in front or back are also device inconsistent to say the least.
If I were designing a home today, I’d specifically have a closet with a pull out rack or similar for a lot of this. But even then, A/C routing, power and sound insulation would make it kind of a pain.
A smaller than a rack, standard footprint would be so much better.