Project: Silent Overkill

[Cenedd]

Yeah, eventually. It involved digging up the entire back garden, half the new kitchen and nearly as much money as having it done in the first place to put right. Now at least the rainwater soaks away and the sewage gets to a sewer. Far better that than the sewage trying (and failing) to soak away and next door's rainwater flooding out of our toilet! *Facepalm*

 

[LePhuronn]

Sounds like you're having lots of fun!

 

[Cenedd]

Hello again all. "Fun" continues and may well do for years now. Like having a kid; when you think you've got it cracked, the rules change. But, I'm starting to look at what to do with my floor-mounted motherboard again. My plan was to look at some sort of custom distro plate and massively overcomplicate my life further. Something that (re-)dawned on me though is that I'll go to all the trouble, it'll look nice on the pictures....and then I'll never see it. The window is on the left of the case and with the room in its current orientation (I can't see if going back), it faces away from me and you could only see it if you came in the door and then hit the deck. So I could move some of my OOSOOM storage* around and try to get the PC on the other side of the desk...if I buy a load of longer moinitor cables etc. That's one option. The other is to change case for something that will invert so the window is on the right. If I do that, I could redesign the Mo-Ra to be on QDCs rather than permanently attached to the side...which does rather make the weight a little, shall we say unweildy! I'll be honest, I'm somewhat inspired there by the "Why didn't I think of that?!" in OC2000's build Could even go wall-mount...but I can't say I've seen anything that inspired me.

Couldn't I just put it all back together how it was but with the new motherboard, GPU etc? Yeah, totally...but I'll be honest, I'm looking at the chasis (with the thick aluminium plates all taken off) and...I don't know, I just don't really want to. It's sort of filling me with 'work' vibes rather than enthusiasm.

So what do people think? Got any suggestions for inverted cases if you're going to suggest that route? O11 Dynamic Evo seems to be one option.


*Out Of Sight Out Of Mind - ie shove stuff under the desk and forget about it

 

[novalis]

Postie's been

I give you, 1.3 kilos of GPU block!






Aaaaand....this is NOT my first rodeo and I'm fully aware I'm er, somewhat accident-prone with coolant ....so I bought enough to play skittles!

Haha that's a whoooole lot of coolant - I fully support the contingency planning

 

[neojay]

Postie's been

I give you, 1.3 kilos of GPU block!






Aaaaand....this is NOT my first rodeo and I'm fully aware I'm er, somewhat accident-prone with coolant ....so I bought enough to play skittles!

Great call with the extra coolant, everytime I filled my presvious loop I had a spill haha. I once had to take a late night trip to halfords!

 

[Cenedd]

Haha that's a whoooole lot of coolant - I fully support the contingency planning

Great call with the extra coolant, everytime I filled my presvious loop I had a spill haha. I once had to take a late night trip to halfords!

Spills?! I'm way beyond spills...I can manage a full-power dual-pump spray directed towards the ceiling, I'm that clumsy experienced! Top tip, remember to close all the stop-plugs you opened to allow air in for a drain BEFORE you fire up the pump

Now, I just need to work out what to put the coolant IN! Rather lost inspiration and motivation to be honest.

In the meantime, something slightly off topic that might be of interest if you happen to need one. A dummy fan. Why? I'm running a server with a drive cage in it. That drive cage has a fan connected and sounds an alarm if the fan fails. Great but I want the fan attached to the motherboard so it's controllable and remotely monitor'able. So the alarm goes off every time it starts until you press the mute button. Fine so long as you don't lose power in the middle of the night....which is how we've got here. Turns out that AdaFruit make a 555 based "Adafruit 555 PWM Output STEMMA" and it was inspired by someone wanting to generate a dummy fan signal. £4 later and a quick dash of 3D printing for a case and we have:






That then connects in here:



Server: 16-core 2GHz Xeon, 48GB RAM, 240GB mirrored SSD pair (Marvell 9200 SATA RAID) for OS (in Zalman cage), 11TB useable array LSI MegaRAID 9271-4i (doesn't support UEFI boot if I remember correctly) running 4x4TB SATA SSDs in RAID5

Which lives here (I said "slightly" off-topic, right?!):



And that's how you yee-ha a server into an under-stairs cubbyhole For reference, that's an EK Varder as exhaust at the top - down 100mm duct through an external cavity wall - and an EK Varder is on the other side of the hole you can just see in the bottom right for intake. The latter was sooo much easier to drill being only a single-layer breeze block wall rather than two layers (that's 13" total) of rock-hard 1940's brick with rock-hard mortar.
PSU is for the (switchable, badly-aged) lighting, the Aquero and the fans.
Switches:

• Cisco 3750G-24PS (dark grey box hanging in the vertical rack on the right) for 24 ports of gigabit PoE and a stonking CLI. Runs PoE (backed by the UPS) to:
  • Mikrotik CRS309-1G-8S+ (white box in the vertical rack) for the 10Gig link from the server to my PC in the Man Cave office - currently an external grade Cat6A buried in ducting (the office is an outbuilding) but with an 8-core OM3 fibre for when I find someone with the kit to terminate it
  • Media switch (Netgear GS108T) running very little these days, just the amp and TV box
  • FTTP ONT (behind media cupboard) via PoE to barrel jack breakout box. This is on a separate VLAN just to use the swtich to inject power.
  • Loft switch (Ubiquiti Flex) via a PoE++ injector (switch only provides PoE - no plusses)
    • CCTV Front
    • CCTV Back
  • Office switch (Netgear GS516TP) running the home office for my wife and I and also powering by PoE
    • Ubiquiti UniFi UAP-AC-Lite access point in the office
    • Ubiquiti Flex Mini switch in the office for the workbench - guest ports for updating PCs
    • small Synology NAS with single disk (not PoE or UPS'd) for backup of server to 'off-site' outbuilding. Critical data also syncs to kit colocated in a data centre but you can't have too many backups!

Router:

• Cisco C1111-8PWE (white box sitting on the UPS) - and excellent bay find that's configured for a horribly complicated mess of VLANs, VRFs and VPNs...for when you need to mix business, pleasure, kids, guests, IoT, CCTV and secure access to customers.... and trust none of them to play nicely together.
  • 350/50 FTTP line via switch to power ONT - the router's WAN port doesn't supply PoE and I don't want/need to complicate things further by running an SVI off the ports that do.
  • Raspery Pi 5 with PoE+ hat and Google Coral TPU (black mesh case sitting on top of the server) running Home Assistant (home automation) and Frigate (CCTV NVR)

Tuner:

• HD HomeRun Quadro (little black box under exhaust fan) - FreeView TV recorded to Plex running on server. Means live and recorded TV are available to me (and family) wherever we are in the world. Also a VPN to the Cisco router means we can appear to be home to get access whilst abroad to TV services that require you to be in the UK.

UPS:

• APC Smart-UPS 1500 - should run everything (about 300W) for an hour (optimistically!)

I think that about covers my slight diversion