Cardboard Server 'Rack'

A while back, I set up a minecraft server. Having had previous internet-visible machines hacked, I decided to have the server sitting behind a dedicated router (actually an old P3 machine). The router has teh smrts, which gives me more confidence of the server's security.

The real reason I'm mentioning it is the case I made for it. 'Case' is really a misnomer, as you can see, but it has allowed me to have two PCs in a small space, and taking up only one plug socket between them.

It's made of many smallish pieces of corrugated cardboard, stuck together in three layers (with the corrugations at right angles from one layer to the next). This allowed me to use up some old packaging, while also providing a fairly rigid and strong sheet material to mount the components on. The motherboards are fixed to a vertical sheet, which is mounted on a horizontal base sheet. The end sheets are pretty much just to keep the vertical sheet upright, but one end also helps hold the PSU in place.

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The photo shows the router, PSU and a mess of power cables. You can see the Compact Flash card and IDE adapter I've used instead of a hard drive. Low power and low noise - plus it meant I didn't have to make somewhere to mount a HDD.

The horrid mess of cables is because I'm using one PSU to power both PCs. I read about making a Y-splitter for an ATX power cable, and decided to give it a go with some terminal blocks. It works just fine, but things get a little weird if you halt one of the PCs - it powers off the PSU, which will take down the other machine as well!

The big coiled yellow cable is the shortest cross-over network cable I could find. :/

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Here you can see the server machine. It's an old Athlon XP, and I've stuck a gigantic fan on the CPU to cut the noise down (the original heatsink fan was a real whiner). This server really does need some storage, so no Compact Flash shennanigans here - I've mounted the hard drive at the end.

The two disadvantages of this old motherboard are that it's enormous, and that it doesn't have onboard graphics. However, the graphics card you can see cost less than a fiver from Palm Technology who sell all sorts of refurbished parts for cheaps.

Anyway, that's my 'case'. It's been around for a few months now, but my lovely wife has salvaged another PC for me, so this case's days are numbered. I'm also about due a desktop upgrade, so I'm designing the replacement to hold four motherboards, probably powered by 2 PSUs. We shall see.

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