catch up
Took roof off truck
Something off the bucket list. not looking forward to putting it back together…
Installed SteamOS, default disc partitioning is sneaky, but i caught it, installed smooth as butter.
Installed CS
Got arse whopped
Bought ETS2, can’t lose 🙂
Hot weather affecting server, so doubled up the fan over the cpu for some more CFM, didn’t work but it looks cool.
portable gaming rig
Cut my ATX case in half, the gtx550ti doesn’t quite fit…
Hard drive is only mount on one side with a piece of aluminium, vibrates too much but for now i’m pretty happy. Just needs a touch of paint and a face to finish.
computer salvage
Amstrad drx890, aka as a sky+ box, salvaged a nice 500gb hard drive, an sata cable, a molex ide to sata power cable and a little heat sink. also the metal it’s made of will be used for other projects. can’t be arsed doing anything with the chip, I’m pretty sure it runs linux, just not interested in re-purposing it.
Moloch is doing well, i gave up on trying to use mdadm software raid and started with LVM, bit of man page reading and bish bash bosh up and running in under a three hours, with only four drives and no need for a fifth system drive, got a whole 400GB’s of space for media and made a 40GB for owncloud. the beauty of LVM is that i can resize any of these logical volumes on the fly, feel like a proper admin now 🙂  soon some game servers will be up and running on this box, all i have to do is find a game that cross’s minecraft and GTA..
Gotta go play Enemy Territory at a LAN party, so i made a short ATX case to make carting about my quad core easy or even possible considering the weight of the bugger. This is the front getting glued on. Some interesting paint and handle to come, but it better be quick drying paint..
Left overs, just bought a 4″ vice some cheap little clamps and a pin hammer to help form all this flimsy sheet metal into RC car parts.
Carpet covered cloud server
Well that vt6410 card don’t work, bios has to support it, probably use the card some time in the future anyway.
So carpet covered server?
Weight them down to make sure it’ll stick well
Then i decided it should be upside down, so i got the small draper hand rotary drill thing (don’t say dremel!) and drilled the five holes i needed to bolt in the meccano hard drive caddy.
Then i decided we didn’t need a face
Extra usb internal ports, will be some how running debian as the system drive here, usb booting is crap with this motherboard, only recognizing the usb every now and then. also at this point the draper’s drill bits melted trying to drill the slightly thicker motherboard caddy metal, so i just just use one nut and bolt to hold the usb female ports on.
Now i needed quiet, most people use either resistors or a 7 volt mod to their PSU’s. i just found a 6v wall wart in my pile of stuff and wired up two big fans with the best bearings. also made it unplug-able in case of upgrades and just to make installing the wires around the case easier.
Hair bands, from back when i was long haired and cool.
Plastic meccano missiles, coz what the fuck else am i gonna use them for?
Here we are, really quiet, sitting on it’s face now, heat path should all be up. hard wired for speed, administrated via ssh, sitting at 52 degrees which is a bit hot, but it’s a warm day and fuck it, i’m not worried. Named it Moloch….
Next is a longer IDE cable for the hard drives, the one i have that will fit is ata33, then some fucking about with a usb key as the system drive.
Teds ypvs racer is looking well!
Proper radiator needed to cool the athena 397cc top end
More Home Server
In hospital again, got the flu, but without an immune system it hits like a truck, delirious all day monday. Turns out my worst anxious nightmare is remotely installing windows. Least i got a nice cell for 48 hours.
So today while shaking like a leaf (swear it’s the hospital food, done more damage then good) Redid a few more bits for the server, 350 watt PSU with a massive fan, nice n quite, Radeon 9200 se gfx card, hooked up a bunch of drives, 6 in total (one 2.5″ ata in hiding), the bottom 20Gb will be the system drive in the future, right after i get the vt6410 raid card to show me some drives! then i can finally put the owncloud database on the raid so OS experiments won’t need a huge re-sync.
Then it’s getting carpet glued to the out side of the case! StarBoyz style, if style is the right word, that ought to do a pretty good job of sound insulation, will have to add an extra intake fan down low on the case along with a dust filter.
potential gaming machine, i love mechwarrior2: mercenaries and carmageddon perhaps it’s time to build small rig specifically to play these old win98/dos games? sick of trying to remember how to get wine to play carmageddon.
only thing wrong as far as i can find is the power board, which is only a tenner on ebay.
board probably died trying to charge pretty dead battery.
or the motherboard is gone, not convinced i should go down this route, the celeron 3 ghz processor is a 70 odd watt design, very hot twin fan, not much performance.
My own server
Wanted my own cloud server, so i built it, hello 1998 hardware!
Something missing there..
Remember always button up everything before checking have you left out anything really important…
Next part was getting extra power for the ati x800 graphics card, not a proper project with out some soldering.
Why extra power? now at this point i was awake for something like 28 hours (dodgy kidneys and coffee, don’t do it kids) so for some reason i built the hard drive caddy with five drives, despite only 2 ata ports on the mobo, any way one turned out dead anyway, i now have 4 healthy maxtors.
Sexy meccano hard drive caddy, really not doing much for heat dissipation, but right now nothing much happening on the drives and there under 40 degrees, so ok for now.
After all that? turned out it was a dead memory stick, ran fine for 3 days anyway..
Specs now are Gigabyte ga-7vt600, athlon xp 2400, ati x800, 1280 ram, four maxtor ata133 hard drives.
Right now i have two drives raid-0’d, one hdd doing nothing, and one as the system drive. will try to get the system drive on a usb stick of some sort so i can free the drives , they will be arranged in raid-10, i could use the speed of raid-0 but the ata cables (two drives on one cable) restrict the speed to make that pointless. and i don’t really need 480 GB’s of space either 240 is loads since i don’t count movies as vital backups.
setup OwnCloud in ten minutes, works great even on the android
Future? build UPS, make it quieter, water cooled cpu, fanless gfx card, air filtration system (briggs and stratton air filter 😀 ) better/quieter fan in the PSU. Maybe a dedicated raid or expansion card so i can skip the usb system drive..
Lovely and warm in ma server room now