I got a while back two Corsair 500R that used to house some servers. One of them went to my brother-in-law with the innards for a haswell-based Dell desktop, the other I wasn't sure what to do with. I've recently decided to set up a home server that'll house PFSense, pi-hole, Unifi Network Application, maybe some other stuff. I want this in the entrance cabinet where my router is, so I can replace the router. The cabinet has about a 37cm opening, the inside is about 45cm, so the 500R wouldn't fit. Something must be done. I tore it down to clean it up (it was in a smoker's house) and drilled out the 5.25" bays which were riveted in. Some mad-lass once gifted me a dremel. Big mistake. I shouldn't be handed a hand-saw, let alone a powered rotary tool. Yet here we are. I cut the top and bottom of the case to the length of the motherboard tray, and cut cut some unnecessary bits off the front to make it fit. Here's what it looks like with the front held in place by hopes and dreams. Hopes and dreams aren't enough though. We need something better to hold the front in place. Perhaps modding cubes? HAH! Maybe if my cuts weren't as crooked as Stephen Fry's nose, that's not the case (HAH) however. L brackets it is. These L brackets are held in place using Nylon nuts and bolts because that's all I had that fit the 5mm hole, and bonus points I can use them as feet. At this point I was fine with the outcome, but figured I'd see if the case would fit with the front panel and respective IO in it's original place and what do you know, it did! So I put it in place, I cut the top plastic piece to length and put that in place and this is the final result. I won't be doing the side panels because there's no way I'd cut it anywhere near straight enough, and they're not flat anyway, so they'd be open at the front.
Proper. As much as I love seeing impossibly meticulous magazine-cover-worthy months-long project mods, it's also nice to be reminded that modding was originally a quick hack bunch of DIY skills selected to get us to a working solution with minimum faffing about or expense. I love reusing stuff like this.
This past weekend I replaced my router and POE injectors with the system I built in this case: It's a headless system with the following specs: Ryzen 9 3900, cooled by a 10yo+ NH-U12 Asus Prime X570 Pro Lexar 2x16GB 3600 cas18 (I think?) Corsair AX850 gold (which is over 10yo) 6x Thermalright TL-S12 Mellanox Connect-X 3 with 2x10Gbit qsfptek SFPs Aliexpress special 4x2.5Gbit with POE (specs indicate POE+ but there's no mention of the + on specs), each port has it's on Intel I226-V, and the nic has an added bonus of INSANE COIL WHINE reeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee WD SN750 512GB (hope to replace with more storage at some point) As for software, I'm running Ubuntu 23.10 installed on ZFS. I'm running Podman for containers and qemu-kvm for VMs. It's all managed using Cockpit (well, CLI for most things). I went for this short-term release of Ubuntu because the version of Podman on 23.04 doesn't support DNS communication between containers. The motherboard's nic is bridged with the internal virtual nic that then connects to the OPNsense VM, so the host system's only networking is virtual. The two NICs are passed-through to OPNsense and it controls the hardware directly. On OPNsense, the two physical nics and it's virtual nic are bridged together to make a "switch," it's also providing DHCP. As for containers, I've got pihole for adblocking, cloudflared for DNSoverHTTPS as pihole's upstream, unifi-network-appliacation to manage the APs (and mongo as it's DB), and nginx as a reverse proxy for all the services. I'll probably replace this dodgy case at some point.
