Project: Servhoernchen.Im.Wald - 26th October 2006

Hi there,
this is my first log, so lets see how it goes. Its actually not a casemod in the classical sense, because basically the case is now the room wall. Most of the work is finished right now but i just sorted through all of the pictures i have taken over the last years and now i am wondering what i could do to make it perfect
The idea was to create a Fileserver that is as unremoveable as possible. Back in Highschool there where some misunderstandings which led to people in uniforms stealing my computer and those of my friends. Back then i had a really old Siemens AT Case from the 80s, which was kind of a safe, with reinforced steel sidedoors and realy realy heavy. They only took that case and nothing else. My friends lost everything from mouse till modem. so i figuered it would be a good idea to build a long term fileserver in a way that would inherently distract everybody from the idea it could be taken anywhere. I put a nice little K6/2 desktop linux box next to it which could be taken easily without any effort, just in case

So i started by killing an old Desktop-AT-Case with a dremel and screwing it to the steel concrete wall in a way that the screws would all be covered by the motherboard. then i hang the PSU at bottom of this. the first one had a nice mounting extension to the top (like used in old cases) which was nice for screwing it to the wall, but later i exchanged it for a less noisy one (120 mm Fan) which now just hangs there on wires that are screwed to the wall. The building is East-German Cold War Era Steel-Conrecte Architecture, Drilling or resetting screwholes is a real pain...i try to avoid it whenever possible. my roommate once hit a stone it the wall which let to a 5 cm exit-wound kind of crater on my side of the wall. next to it the Lucent Cellpipe (horrible modem but my ISP leaves me no choice) found its place. The Mainboard was an old Gigabyte with a buggy Onboard IDE 3 & 4 from one of my roommates. but it kind-of-survived 3 years in the end.



Then i arrived at the question what to do about HDDs. I looked at some of the old AT Cases which are just lying around anyway, but nothing realy came to mind. So i asked a friend wiht an bending machine to make two 90° edges into a big metal plate. Just some dremeling and toth shattering drilling later it looked like this:



Again, the screwholes are covered by the HDDs so you would have to disassemlbe everything to get that off the wall. At first i had an old Seagate Cheetah 10 GB SCSI-drive (spinning up sounds like a starting plane) for Windows 2003 at the top, but after 3 days the neighbhours were complaining that i would be running a old needle printer none stop and they cant sleep (steel concrete has fascinating acoustic properties) so i had to remove it and that led to the kind of ugly solution with 2 IDE drives in the top slot. I like even numbers As display i put an antique 10" BW Display next to it, by now its gotten so dark that you can only use inverted colors but most of the time we use remote control anyways.



And here is a romantic impression from last Christmas:



Some weeks ago i started modifying it again, changing the mainboard, adding a SATA-RAID Controller and some Drives and moving everything over to Ubuntu Linux (which took about a week) after which it looked like this:



After this (because the 200 GB SATA Drive got so hot that i had to put a room fan next to them) i finally had an excuse to start on Watercooling. I already had most of the parts, i just never got around to it. So i dusted off the Old VW-Radiator which a Friend had left on my Balcony 2 years ago and tried to figure out a sane way to use the 30 mm tubes at its back with my other components that alle belonged to an 8 mm system. What i came up with reminded me of the IBM campaign about the "ultimate universal adapter". It consists of 6 different parts, screwed into each other.



So after that i hooked up the radiator for a testrun. "sane" went out of the window, but it worked. It took ages to fit it together, because apperantly the hose and the connectors had different oppions on the definition of 30 mm. I also tried the fan on the radiator with a HDD power connector. at 12 V that thing can nearly chop off your fingers but luckily in the end passive use turned out to be sufficient.



So now I started putting everything together. Starting with a home-grown copper-HDD-cooler that was welded together by a friend of mine (the one with the bending machine, his grandfather was a smith and his father is a plumper, so the house is the place to go for anything involving metal) which nicely fits on the top of the HDD-rack. The Positioning of the radiator is just temporary, i will attach it to the wall over the mainbord the next time some heavy drilling equipment is avaible (steel concrete, again )



Then it was time to get rid of the extra PSU (which i never needed anyway after i figured out a combination of drives that nicly worked together on one connector-string of only one PSU), attached the pump (my old eheim, back from the times when they were still used for aquariums) and CPU cooler (also an antique monster from the first days of Sockel A) and started filling.



The whole thing sounded like a room fountain and i got a little worried. but after 2 hours everything still seemed to be ok. That radiator is thirsty as hell, i already refilled the "coolant expansion reservoir" (google translation ) 2.5 times since yesterday evening. Now everything is up and running, with the CPU at about 40°C (its an old Athlon 1700+) and none of the HDDs hot enough to burn my fingers. Nice.
Now i just have to figuere out a way to clean up the cables and hoses without ruining the mood.

Any suggestions?

 

Hah...i like those rads, ive one from a opel kadett the 'dusrtigkeit' of the radiator is - imho - that tere are more or less bubbles in your sys.

 

the noise was probably air in the system, you will want to get that out (for cooling and noise purposes)

Very interesting mod though, caseless f1w ey

 

i like those rads 2.. very interesting!!

 

Yeah i figuered it would be bubbles/air but theres not much i can do about that besides wait and refill. A friend suggested waving and turning the radiator around. He is welcome to try...
When i first started cleaning the radiator, there was rust comming out for 2 hours. Nothing a litte Rohr-Frei cant fix, i just hope i doesnt start leakin once there are no more bubbles in it

 

lol rohr-frei is for clean closed pipes. try the cillit bang crystals but handle your rad with care while shaking the bang mixery...my rad started to leak slighlty...but now its close again, i think due to a lot of dirt

and fill frostschutz for a car engine...ah anti corrosive, thats what i mean

€: am i blind or why dont i see a pump?

 

Jeah well i bet some of the pipes in there were closed... but seriously, most of it was just dirt and little rust particles, i put the shower hose in one end and let the water run for some time. during the first test there still was some dust coming out but i think i got everything by the time i installed the complete system. the pump is hanging right next to the PSU, a little hidden. I plan to screw it to the wall sooner or later, for now its just hanging on the hose. I used reinforced hoses with 3 mm thickness so no worry about that little bit of weight.
I make some Detail shots as soon as i get my camera fixed (right now i can only randomly aim and use almost no settings because i have to press very hard on the battaries since nikon are a bunch of morons when it comes to case design)
Originaly i choose them just because they look cooler then blank PVC hoses, which i have in my real PC. I always fellt a little silly putting green goo in there just for looks But i defnitly will get anti-oxidant.

 

You should try cleaning the radiator with Coca Cola. I haven't tried it myself, but they say it's much better than any cleaning product. Very cool mod by the way.

 

Thank you. I just noticed i left out all the impressing numbers, so here they are:

11 HDDs with two RAID 5 arrays with totaly 1200 GB usable space (1.2 Terrabyte)
Athlon 1700+ with 512 MB Ram which so far exactly fits the needs of managing software raid arrays, routing and running some mules. And a 500 W noname PSU for everything except the Eheim pump which has its own. The PSU and the pump are connected to a UPS. The sad thing is i already have only 80 GB free space left

I think the problem with coke would be the sugar. I dont plan on farming algae.

 

omg... That simply looks scary I've been planning some sort of server on my own as I have 2400+ lying around, but I'd possibly make it.. well.. a bit less noticeable.

 

I guess it's always this way... no matter how much space you initially got on your system, it's always 90% full after a short time.
Maybe twice as much storage than the Internet got online would be sufficient for some time, but only for some time.
But then... the more space you've got, the more careless you'll fill it with stuff...

 

What do you guys put on your systems I have maybe 40Gb's on over 300Gb's of space. Yipees.

 

Well, some people collect stamps, I collect TV Shows

 

Now im doing some sketching for future cooling of the rest of the HDDs. I have to prepare for the next summer season


Any input? i worry a bit about all the up and down in the circulation...

 

it looks nice but you will need a good pump to move that much water straight up

 

I wouldn't worry about the water as much as I would worry about the pressure in the lines. Water in a closed loop will not cause pressure due to head only due to friction Soo the only thing is that thats an uber lot of pipes. So ya a high head pump will be needed just for the amount of distance of the pipe. Iono I would try a different layout maybe. maybe 4 lines. So all the water in/out is on top.

 

I would love to decorate the whole room in this glowy-green-kinda-borg-cube way, but i think it would be to expensive. Instead i will go for a Cold War theme, i still have a lot of Nixie Tubes to build a cool thingy, and some nuklear bunker equpiment from the NVA (a litte station, one probe and one hadn held device that can be atached to the station and used as display and interface). Here is another impression of how the room looks now... still much to do. luckly its not that big, the camera is witht he back to the wall here.

http://www.mackiol.net/modules/mx_smartor/album.php?smartor_mode=album_pic&pic_id=295

 

Ok, this week i finaly got around to reworking the PSU with a soldering gun.
I redid the complete wiring for all the harddisks, ending up with 4 SATA and 8 IDE power conectors axactly where they are needed. While i was at it i replaced the near-death original PSU fan with a silent illuminated one.
To finish up i added some acid green colored anti-corrosive to the cooling water.
Yummy

 

WOW man .
cant say anything else.
how many HDD's do you have?
keep up the good work

 

This are currently 3 200 GB SATA HDDs on the raid 5 controller (can be expanded to 4) and 8 160 GB IDE HDDs at the rest. currently im messing around with the softraid configuration for these, cause the stupid SIL 0680 PCI controlers i have are extremly slow and nearly crash when all 4 ide divicec connected to it are used simultaniosly.

Total usable Storage Space is currently (3-1)*200 + (8-1)*160 = 400 + 1120 = 1520 GB = 1,5 Terrabyte

Tha sad thing is, that like always with storage drives, the are nearly full