Addictronics

OK, so over the years I have acquired my fair share of pc’s and pc parts. Most all of them were just given to me and are a Pentium III or lower. By moving and swapping parts between them I have been able to get them all working, but what do I need 10+ pc’s for? Especially if they are Pentium III’s or lower. Well most all of this started with my Water Cabinet project where I used an old 200mhz Pentium II machine as a FreeNAS file server. It worked quite well and impressed me a lot. Since then I have upgraded a little. I am currently running a file server, web server (which is hosting this website), and a firewall (Smoothwall Linux). They are all in the attic where my dinky home network all comes together. My Smoothwall Firewall box is on the left with the fileserver in the middle and the webserver is on the right. Sitting on top of the air duct is the switch and battery backup along with the cable modem.

Now that the summer months are approaching, I started monitoring the temperatures more closely. I am not happy at all with the temps that the hard drives are reporting back but they really do not surprise me. A change is in order and I have decided to move them out from the top of the attic to down next to the central heating and air unit.

Okay, I might have been able to take pictures of the building process but just didn’t. Here is the completed unit in place. Each 2×4 will support a shelf that will have a pc on it. One shelf per pc, I went ahead and made 4 shelves for future expansion but for now the extra shelf with hold the batter backup and network switch. You might recognize the black 6 fan holder from the Water Cabinet project, probably because that is where I got it from. I took the 12v inverter you see sitting on the bottom shelf and cut the end off of it to power the fans, it works very well and provides plenty of ventilation for the case.

I went ahead and added the first shelf, On it I have screwed down the motherboard, power supply, floppy drive, and hard drive of the web server. It is a 600mhz 382mb 40gig Pentium III system.

Inside the webserver before.

The second shelf is the 1ghz 256mb 750gig Pentium III File Server. I use it to backup my music, dvd and data disks.

Inside the fileserver before the case upgrade.

This case is extremely heavy duty, I really do not remember where I got it but it has held no less than 5 different pc’s since I’ve owned it.

Using some cardboard and more duct tape I made a nice little duct for the air to flow directly onto the processor.

My goal was to try and get as much airflow over the hard drives and processor as I could. The side duct handled the processor but I still needed to work on the airflow for the harddrives. By adding additional slots in the front I could get greater air flow.

Behind the slits I cut a hole in front of the harddrives. Also I put some duct tape over the existing holes so that all air is directed over the harddrives. This lowered temperatures by about 8deg F.

The rack so far. Notice the duct tape for an extra air-tight seal.

Finally on the top shelf is the Firewall. It is a 300mhz 128mb 10gig Pentium II. I installed Smoothwall on it and have had no problems. Not long ago I “upgraded” it to the 10 gig hard drive for more cache space, which noticeably improves web browsing. The floppy drive is used for setting backups and worked great when I decided to change hard drive size. Smoothwall can be installed on a 1 gig drive and I would recommend installing it on a Compact Flash drive or SSD because of the reduced power consumption. I will probably end up going that route later on.

Inside the firewall before the case change.

Notice how I zip-tied two Pentium II heat sinks together to try and keep the processor as cool as possible.

Other side.

The back of the firewall had a spot for a 90mm fan but I put some duct tape over it to redirect the air flow as best I could. Same with the PCI slots.

I went ahead and set the switch in the bottom shelf and still need to attach the back and top before I can slide the filter in.

The final product. I used a 20″x30″x1″ Filter to keep dust and other particles out, It should be easy to clean and this system is a prototype of sorts for me to try this idea out. You can see one cable coming out of the front in this picture but it is soon to be moved to the small hole I have in the bottom shelf for cables.