LAN In A Box - Part 8, Server Mounts

One of the main aims for this was also to have the server in the box for whatever duties were required. A fairly decent core was donated by Sue when she upgraded meaning LIAB will be served by an i5, 8GB of RAM and assuming it works ok, not have to deal with an external GFX card as there is both VGA and DVI on board.

The board is to be mounted up the back of the upper section above the patch panel support by the shelf. Using some 9mm ply works to make a suitable support for the board and shouldn't warp, twisting the board.

The board itself fits nicely as planned with the only problem being mounting it. Standard motherboard stand offs cannot be easily attached to the ply due to the thickness of the wood, and the difficulty of getting nuts for the thread (M3 or 4 x 1.5 it appears)

To solve this, M3 bolts with lock nuts were fixed to the board in the ATX pattern as stand offs to mount the motherboard on to. The regular nuts would then fit over the top of the board and hold it in place while the lock nuts prevented the screws moving.

There is just enough thread taken up by the nuts to leave a gap between the board and the ply across the whole area.

I was going to trim the bolts down, but by the time the board was on it would have been annoying to do, plus threading onto a very short thread is difficult after it's been cut, and they don't get in the way of anything as it stands.

With the board in place the other elements need to be fixed in place too. This will be an SSD for the boot drive and a regular HDD for data storage.

Using some scrap aluminium from an older project I made four brackets to fit the two drives and trimmed them to match one another...

Holes for the screws were added...

Before being placed for the mounting holes to the board. (At this point I could have trimmed the motherboard standoffs down, but I still didn't)

The drives hold in well and don't move around, which is good, at least for the magnetic drive. Originally I was going to mount the SSD direct to the brackets, but then realised i'd drilled the holes for a 3.5" drve and the SSDs were a different pattern. Oops.

Fortunately I had a spare SSD mounting bracket which would work perfectly to fix the problem

Next up, mounting the Server-Board to the back, adding power and WiFi.

LAN In A Box - Part 7, Return of the Cable Nightmare.

A lot of progress has been made on LIAB since the last post about cables, despite a couple of months of stalling waiting to get some parts and have the time. However, much has progressed.

All of the cables are now in the lower portion and run towards the patch panel up the back. They're a little more bulky than I would have liked. somewhere down the line if I ever rebuild this, this is one fo a few minor tweaks i'd make to the sizing.

In order to stop the swarm of cables escaping the front of the box as they were pushing the door, this fetching yellow zip tie had to be added. I'll probably change this if I remember never :)

So the nest of cables lives in the top of the box, ready for patching, fortunately I numbered every cable to be sure it ends up in the right port. What I should have done was do it much further down the cable however, so began an hour of shortening and relabeling cables to fit everything back inside.

I would have gone straight to patching, were it not for the panel I intended on using finally giving up and refusing to play ball. I found that certain pairs on some ports would only transmit if both cables of that pair were punched down. And some wouldn't unless one was removed. It was a nightmare and in the end for the sake of £20, i bought a new panel.

In the mean time, this is the contents of the box. Some spares such as power and ethernet cables, an uplink cable to the hall's 'net socket, and 4-way to extend power to the box if needed and a load of spare parts for the box itself including a keyboard, HDD, and two wifi APs

... plus a screen.

 This week will be pretty thick with updates of LIAB as it needs to be working for the weekend. Wish me luck!

The DarkSide Ethos

I found this today on imgur and it pretty accurately describes the process most of my projects work from:

Buying is normally the last resort, either for something specific or to make use of something I already have. Engineering on a budget isn't easy!