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How to waste a saturday

I've been planning on reworking my server room at home to go from two machines (gehenna [mail/files/firewall/gateway] + pacific [backup]: ~100 watts between them) down to one really energy efficient one (~25 watts) that does one all of the stuff of the main server + has one level of backup (the old backup disks will go off to the co-lo and be stuffed into gehenna so I can have some of my backups offsite.)

The stumbling box was finding a case. Most of the server cases out there either assume that you're going to have a server packed with dozens of disks, are thin & deep pizzaboxes (I've already got a Sun 4 box sitting in the basement, thanks, so that's enough pizzaboxes for one house already), or have ports on them I don't want. Eventually I gave up (I did find some cases that looked nice, but US$200 for a 2u rackmount case is a bit pricy for me after buying the processor board, SATA disks, solid-state root disk, and berkshire watchdog card) and left the existing machines sitting there guzzling 72kwh/month.

About two months ago, I went into the local hardware store to buy some parts for an emergency hardware project and saw a stack of aluminum sheets and beams sitting over by the plumbing supplies. I didn't think much of them, but a few days later realized that if I was going to put my new server into a case I wanted, the sensible thing to do would be to buy some of that aluminum and make a case from scratch.

I went back to the hardware store, bought a stack of aluminum, took it home, cut and fitted some of the parts, then stalled out for several weeks trying to figure out the best way to fasten the thing together. This time wasn't a total easte, because I'd purchased a nice power switch and some steel grating material online and had to wait for it to get home before I could use it, but I still couldn't figure a good way to stick everything together. I thought about learning to weld and welding the case together (certainly the best way to get a nice sleek modern case, but learning to weld would take the project into the realm of the absurd), I thought about going steampunk and bolting it together with carriage bolts (but couldn't find any suitably small carriage bolts, and even if I could find them aluminum sheet doesn't exactly give off the appropriate MAD SCIENCE aura that good steampunk has), I even thought about using epoxy to glue the pieces together (no. just no.)

While I was thinking about what to do, I had to go back to the hardware store to get a 1/2 inch drill bit to finish another project (replacing a door that had torn out of the doorframe thanks to 100 year old wood shrinking enough to let the screws work against it; I needed the drill bit so I could drill out the holes, glue 1/2 inch dowels into them, then screw the door into those dowels. It's not a perfect solution, but it's better than just leaving the door off the closet) and, while I was searching for the bit I spotted a pile of pop rivet drivers.

Now that would work. I could use rubber cement to stick the frame members to the sheet, then pick up the assemblies, drill and rivet them, and Bob's your uncle:

This is, as you can guess, not quite finished. The elegant glued on pricetags are still to be peeled off and then I need to walk around the case cleaning off all the leftover adhesive from all of the other labels that the supplier stuck all over the metal. But this case is ~2u (it's actually 3.25" instead of 3.5" so I can put rubber feet on it and still fit it into a 2u slot) x 18" x 10", which gives me enough room to install a couple of disks, a mini-itx motherboard, the berkshire watchdog, and even have room for a fan if I get worried about airflow.

Oh, and I need to paint the inside black, because the on/off switch on the front of the case has one nice feature that doesn't want excess reflections around it:

It's a server, so yes, it's going to be tucked away in the basement. But it will be quiet (probably as quiet as the macbook I'm typing this on, modulo horrible hard disk induced vibrations which aren't going to happen because the hard disks are on a nice isolating rubber mat) and I'll be happier spending time down there (where I'll have a chair! And [eventually] a desk/drawing table! And a cat6 cable connecting the macbook to the little Linux box that's serving as my wireless router [a Netgear WRG54 running a 2.6(mumble) kernel and eating about 5 watts] so I can shovel large files to and from the file server without waiting for 50,000 years for the rsync to finish) when an army of cooling fans isn't going WHIRRRRRRRRRRR in the background. And the 1ghz C7 in this server is about thrice as fast as the 500mhz C3s that are in my current hardware, so I'll be able to do things like recompile kernels in finite time again.

—orc Sat Sep 22 22:34:53 2007

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