Uni's Rack Farm [updated thread structure 2 accomodate new 20K character post limit]

Heres some pics of the Codegen case without any hardware in it, am building a rig into it next week once some more parts arrive so will put the rest of the pics up then...

The fans that come with it are a joke, the 120mm front fan is asthmatic and the 80mm in the back..... well I cant even tell if any air is coming out of it as it turns so dammed slow lol.
They are very very cheap fans and not worth the molex plugs they come with so a fan upgrade is a must - I've ordered a 120mm 1900rpm Scythe Kaze Jyuni for the front and I got some good 80mm thermaltakes to fit into the rear.

Fans aside though the case is very well built, comes with big rubber feet you can stick anywhere as the handles and side rails come off which means you 'could' use it as a tower or large desktop, a bargain for the money I think anyway

 

Nice Pics, I have a spare 12U rack if anyone is interested, but its a bit heavy to post ??

 

I can see lots of rackmount cases over the internet, where can you get racks as I cannot find them?

 

You can find a good rack at hooters!

 

?
The internet ?

Depends on the depth of case.

Standard computer racks are dirt cheap on fleabay providing you collect.
For the cases I've shown you can use an audio rack (although not many come up 2nd hand)

 

If only that was 28u I'd be in the car on my way to collect (after the booze had worked it's way out of my system)

 

Hi Sas, I'm a long way from Surrey But I'll never forget where Caterham is

 

Stafford is where my friendly BMW dealer is.

It's not too far away, but the rack is now too small (currently have 4x 4u racks + switches etc & another system to setup on monday)

 

12u eh? How much you after for that taffy? I can get it collected in mainland UK and sent over here pretty cheap, as long as it's broken down to semi flatpack size. Not that it will hold everything that's going in my farm, but it'd be a start

Nice pics coolamasta, thanks for posting

 

UPDATE - 09/05/09
There's more to discuss! Really what I am doing here is putting all my ideas and plans down in print so that I don't overlook anything or make any major erros in what I buy. It's also good to get the opinions of everyone else on the team about certain things.

Location & Cooling
So where do you put a 6' tall, very heavy and very very loud server cabinet full of folding hardware that will run 24/7? I don't have a space like Nitteos to put it in, and I definately don't have an air conditioned server room like Atlas has. Originally I had planned on putting it in my workshop here at home, but after thinking about it and looking around down there today, I can safely say that it's not a suitable place for it to go. Apart from a lack of anywhere really suitable to put it against the wall (the workshop's walls are all used up with freestanding metal & wall mounted wooden shelving, and my bench), there is the issue of me not being here enough of the time to maintain it and keep an eye on it.

From the middle of the summer I will be spending much more time living in my other house, which is close to the University that I attend and will be close to my place of work for the next 12 months. I am entering Yr number 4 of my Degree which is a placement year where I must spend a minimum of 12 months working in the industry relevant to the degree that I am studying. This means that instead of moving home for the summer like I usually do I am just staying at the other house until my placement is over. The point I have been coming to here is that there's a cold, empty and totally unused garage at that house. There's nothing but a lawnmower and a wheelie bin in it at the moment.

It's actually a different house that I am moving into, just across the street from where I have been living at Uni for the past couple of years. The owner of the new house is a good friend of mine and has also recently become a CPC/ BT folder (dcservices). He tells me that he had planned to plasterboard the walls of the garage and turn it into a workshop for himself up there (he owns the house and rents it to students but he lives in S. Ireland). We discussed it a little the other day and decided that we could put a cool air vent in the garage wall whilst we are plaster boarding it and duct ourside air either directly into the cabinet or into an AC unit which would then pass the cooled air into the cab. It is basically as ideal a place for the farm to go as I have available without building my own air conditioned server room to house it!

So to sum up the future location of the farm; It's going to be placed in the garage at my new university accomodation which is going to be modified for the purposes of housing the farm cabinet and providing it with the relevant power, cooling and network requirements that it needs. The owner of the house as I have already said is a friend of mine and a folder, and seems to be all for the idea. I plan on living there for the duration of my placement year (July- September) and also for my final University year, so I will be around plenty of the time to monitor the farm and make any modifications or upgrades that are necessary on it.

Preliminary Racking Hardware List
This is a list of what I plan on having in the cabinet itself, and obviously what type of cabinet is going to be required to house everything. Subject to change!

5x 4u Rack cases for up to 5 folding rigs
1x 4u Rack case for a file/ network server
1x Rack mounted KVM switch capable of switching between 6+ machines
1x Network switch
1x Rack mounted monitor
UPS capable of powering everything in the rack for a period of at least a few hours in the event of a power cut. Required specs for this to follow.

The cabinet itself - Needs to be (by my estimates) at least 40u. 42u is a common size. Must be enclosed i.e. ave top and side panels and a door. I would prefer the door to be mostly glass. It must have some sort of single vent for the air intake to attach to. The exhaust at the rear of the cabinet will possibly have to be custom cut by yours truly, as I definately want it to be enclosed at the rear as well as the front and sides. I don't want to be pulling the whole thing apart every couple of months to dust the inside of the rigs so I am going for this "single intae, single exhaust" idea as I will be able to filter the air being drawn into the cab and the exhausted warm air can be ducted wherever I want. I know it won't be heard in the garage but for the sake of a few extra £ I would also like to soundproof the cabinet itself, assuming I don't buy a pre soundproofed one that is.

I would appreciate any comments or further suggestions on what I have written tonight - particularly on racking hardware! It's going to be tough for me to find a cabinet that suits my needs perfectly, and it would be handy to start accumulating a list of places in the UK that will be willing to ship all this (it's pretty heavy stuff) to NI. Thanks for all your comments and help so far, and keep an eye out for photos of that first rack case .

 

UPDATE - 13/05/09
Here are some photos of the garage in it's current state. I know it's not much to look at, but give me a few weeks at it once I move in and it'll be fit for the rack

[on a side note I like what Imageshack have done with their website, it's very clean and uncomplicated, and much faster than before too!]


One of the 2 concrete vents that are incorporated in the garage wall


This shows the spacing of the 2 vents, the side door is just beyond the far vent


You can see the side door in this picture along with the rear vent. The door will probably have to be replaced with a security door when the rack is in


This is the beamed ceiling that the garage currently has, easy to run cables through and then cover up with ceiling boards!


This gives an idea of the size of the garage... It's not big, but it doesn't really need to be


Here you can see some sockets on the wall. These will have to be removed and re-mounted on the new plasterboard that we install. Also pictured is the stuff that the garage currently has in it, most of which isn't really important


This is the inside of one of those vents. I'm planning on chiselling the concrete lattice out of them and installing an industrial type vent cover or grill on the outside of the wall


This is the small fusebox and the inside of the other vent, and also shows the broken main door. Again, the fuse box will have to be moved


There's a fluorescent fitting already on the ceiling. I think it's about 6' long

The pictures of inside are a little dark but you may have noticed that the side door doesn't actually lead in there. The back wall of the main garage in these photos is a partitioning wall and behind that is another part of the garage that seems to have been made into a coal shed in the past. We are going to cut a doorway through the partition wall (it's just one block thick) into that coalshed which will then give the side door access to the whole garage. I know it looks like a lot of work at the moment, but it's not that major. Give me a few weeks chipping away at everything that needs to be done and I'll have it sorted

 

18-05-09 Update - New K9A2 Motherboard for a new quad card rig

UPDATE - 18/05/09
As promised, here is (eventually) the update involving my newest MSI K9A2 Platinum motherboard. I had to wait all weekend to get this as I have been in Portrush since Friday afternoon at the NW200. Alongside the three weekends that Multiplay hold the iSeries on each year, the NW200 weekend of racing is one of the most important in the year for me. Sadly the bad weather this year meant that the event was not able to run smoothly or in full, and tragically a young rider (Mark Young, 22) who came off at the fastest corner on the track, Mathers Cross, died in hospital of his injuries. This follows last years loss of road racing legend Robert Dunlop (Brother of the late and famous Joey Dunlop) at Mathers, and will no doubt force the race organisers to take a look at methods for reducing the lethal speed that riders carry through the corner.

Anyway, I got the board last night and have spent the morning rebuilding my #3 folding rig with it as the new platform to allow upgradeability. The two 8800GS cards that JackOfAll provided me with were in an Asus board that I need for something else and the 9800 that is in my media PC will probably end up in this as well, eventually. So this is a sort of amalgamation of Rig #2 and Rig#3 from above.

Can I first of all say that the build quality of the K9A2 that I received was utterly disappointing straight out of the box. I would probably send it back but I suspect that there is a batch of them out there that all have the same poor fit and finish. For starters, many of the plugs and connectors on the board such as auxillary power sockets and sata ports are misaligned with their PCB markings, and the Driver disc that was supplied in the box was totally useless, as only one of the drivers would install off it. The rest had to be downloaded from the MSI website on another PC and installed on the folding rig off a memory stick, and the Dual Core Center utility refuses to run on a fresh and fully updated copy of XP, so it's obviously a bad release.

I received two other boards at the weekend, both manufactured by Biostar (A TP45-HP and the excellent TPower I45), and both of these boards, costing a similar amount of money to the MSI, were not only better assembled but were also a lot easier to install and configure due to their superior design. Biostar have become a serious player in the motherboard industry and have recently proven to me time after time that they really know what they are doing when it comes to designing and manufacturing a great motherboard. I take the build quality of my PC's very seriously and always strive to deliver a high end product that cannot be matched by any mainstream company, and for this reason the quality of individual components is of paramount importance. This particular MSI board is a bit of a disappointment to be honest, but as long as it works and folds well I guess complaining about trivial things like fit and finish is pointless.

Incidentally the I45 that I bought is to replace an MSI K8N Neo Platinum out of a 5 year old PC of mine that died late last week, details on that in this thread. I have that rig running again and going better than ever, but my point here is that the MSI board that I was replacing lasted 5 years, and was possibly the best S754 motherboard ever manufactured! I hope that this latest MSI is a rare exception and that MSI have not let their standards slip any.

I did not go through with the order for the Compucase rack case, as it did not support 4x dual slot graphics cards and I wish to keep all of the cases in my rack the same. I am still on the hunt for more racking solutions that allow 4 dual slot PCI-E cards but in the meantime I installed this rig into an old desktop chassis that I had lying around. I'm sorry for the low image quality, I had to take them on my iPhone as I didn't have my camera here with me. The thing takes decent enough photos using the ProCam app from the app store, and I hope they are detailled enough for you to see what's going on!

[Change of plans] Imageshack is currently not showing the images that i am trying to put in this update. I will probably move all the images to personal share space sometime in the next few weeks for greater reliability. In the meantime here is the link to the image gallery[/Change of plans]

Current Spec of Rig 3
MSI K9A2 Platinum Motherbaord
AMD Athlon 64 X2 6400 Black Edition
Arctic Cooling Freezer 64 Pro
2GB OCZ Reaper HPC (PC2-8500 1066Mhz) RAM
2x 384MB Geforce 8800GS
Antec Truepower Quattro 850W
Old IDE 60GB WD hard drive

 

04-06-09 Update - Fahmon stats online

UPDATE - 04/06/09

Just a quick update today, but not really to the farm as such. I have put the farm's fahmon stats online using the built in web app function in fahmon itself. My page is here and is also linked in my sig if you need to access it from outside of this thread. Atlas folder has a similar setup to this for his many clients. I'd like to thank Votick, a fairly new member of the CPC & b-t team for helping me with setting this up and also for providing the custom template that it uses. If you want to do this for your hardware and have some web space that you can host it on, the guide that I followed is here and the CPC & bit-tech template code is in this post in the thread that Votick started. It couldn't be easier as long as you have a minimal knowledge of html and batch files, and even if you don't, the guide linked above will tell you everything step by step anyway! Thanks for reading and fold on!

 

very nice setup you got there

bif fault with the K9A2 is the SATA placement why i never used them due to that i needed HDDs plugged into them for server, i have 10x9800GX2 soon operating (8 full time as one system is now at my friends house playing need for speed some some times its not folding on 2 gpus) i have 7 now (2 some times idle above comment)

 

Thanks mate. There will be a proper (new info) update to the thread at the start of next week. There is no point in posting what I have written now because my friend Jonny has the pictures to go along with the story He kindly photographed our progress in getting power and network to the garage mentioned above and also a couple of pics of the dedicated rigs in their new home (it's still a bit rough as we haven't cleaned it out yet but I wanted to make use of the increasingly cold weather here ASAP and Craig (my friend, the owner of the house) was in the mood for doing it this week, so we wasted no time

Incidentally I should mention that the plan to put the farm in the garage itself has changed since I posted the update above. More on that in the update but basically they are in an old coalshed that's part of the garage, behind the space that you can see in the above photographs.

I just got back from a day of lectures (yes, on a Friday... ALL day ) and my quad card rig had locked up at 12pm today. Not sure if it's a RAM issue as that rig occasionally does throw that curveball my way or if it is getting too dusty in it's new (still very full of conrete dust and dirt) home. A good powerhosing is in order next week, I think. That way there'll be a clean blank slate to start on when we begin to plasterboard it and put the ceiling boards on. AS I've already said it's a very old coalshed so expect to see lots of dirt in the photographs. By the time I'm finished with it though, it will be a proper, clean server room

 

Coalshed server room sounds good stuff mate

What OS you using on your rigs out of interest?

 

Hehe I know, coalshed is teh awesome! At the moment my GPU's (8800's) are running with core temps of 60 degrees under full load!

I'm running XP Pro at the moment but when I get it "racked" I'm hoping to run them all on Linux and burn the overclocks into the card BIOS etc etc