LAN In A Box - Part 10, The Cable Finale (Almost)

The last of the cabling took two sessions and actually went pretty quickly. So much so I didn't take that many pictures because it didn't seem interesting enough. 

Here's some patched cables.

Here are all of the patched cables.

There was one minor flaw I noticed really a little late in the day. The new patch panel has it's holes at the outer edge of the U. The old on didn't and had it's mounting holes in the center of the U. As a result, next time the sides pieces are out they'll have to be redrilled for the new panel, but fortunately it's hardly impossibly difficult to do.

This was mean't to be the last update before the first sue of LIAB in the wild, but the PSU died while trying to install the OS so delayed everything, the network side will be ready, but the server itself is probably going to be done at the event.

LAN In A Box - Part 9, Power Up!

 I forgot to take a picture of the brackets for the power supply, but they weren't really all the interesting to see being made. They're more spare aluminium bend round and hammered to fit closer, then screwed and pop riveted into place to allow it to be removed, but still held securely, even to the thin ply on the back.

One thing I had forgotten to do earlier was make the hole for the power cable to actually get to the PSU, as well as the Wireless AP.

Forstner and Festool bit to the rescue! One wasn't enough, so had to double up and make it wider for the kettle plug to get through.

The ideal position for the AP had to be near the top as the box was going to be on the floor, having the AP on the floor wasn't going to help a great deal.

Mounting it at the top in a position where the antenna can fold up also kept it well out of the way of everything inside knocking it when packing. After finding the position where the antenna flipped up and didnt hit the front/lid I made a shelf when a couple of notches to locate the feet of the AP.

The shelf fastened to the side of the box...

And the AP sit's on top. The only down side is that the AP can still fall of the shelf and there's no easy way to fix the AP from underneath without damaging the casing itself.

The solution is a hook shaped bracket, which in retrospect didn't need to be hooked, it could have been a loop as it has to be unscrewed to remove the AP anyway, but never mind.

Here, the antenna is up and the AP fully mounted the the door roughly in place with no collision.

With all the main hardware mounted (at least that I had at the time), one major thing remained, how to power the server on. Quite a few years ago I started making a server case from scratch using aluminium L section and a lot of head scratching. It had a few neat features, one of which was a toaster-mount dvd drive in the top of the case.

 Because the server case took longer to make than it had a use for (I went to rack mounting for my servers) the Buglin switch i bought never actually got used for more than testing. This seems like a good idea to use it, rather than it just sit in a box.

The switch itself has a thread shallower than the thickness of the wood, once again forstner bits to make the hole and recess sorted the problem.

And mounted!

Made a lot of progress in this visit to my parents, back to the homestead to continue with cabling, order parts and setup the server. Unfortunately the spare PSU I had only has a 4 pin 12V connector to the motherboard, but the board itself has an 8 pin. Will be buying an adapter for 4-pin and molex to 8pin connector soon.

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!

LAN In A Box - Part 6, Cables!

eBay is a funny thing, sometimes you get screwed over in what you receive, sometimes you get a lot more. I came back one day to find a package has arrived, about 4 feet long, no idea what it was, nothing i'd ordered was this kind of size and weight.

As it turned out, it was a pair of 3U rack rails i'd ordered from eBay the week before. Only they were slightly bigger, 30U in fact. So if anyone needs a couple of dozen U of rack rails, let me know! Here they are besides the Box they're supposed to fit inside...

After a little while with a hacksaw and file the rails were trimmed to a more reasonable 2U (I thought 3U would be too big, but gave enough extra to play around with). The left rail attaches to a pine uprights which screws to the base and the other to the side.

Here's a picture of the power and switch (which should probably have been in the previous post about power installation. The second 4-way was shortened substantially to neaten it all up.

The first runs of cable go in!

After what felt like an hour of threading cat5 cables, the first batch were tidied together with cable ties into a 4x4 bundle. It looks incredibly neat, but it's also an enormous pain to do in a small space.

Next comes patching and testing and more threading of cables. So many cables...

LAN In A Box - Part 5

The next thing to tackle is the front and top of the box. Ideally this needed to be hinged in two places, but also lightweight enough to open easily and not add too much weight.

With that in mind, using 1/8" plywood keeps the weight down, but it has a reasonable amount of flex. Fixing piano hinge to the back keeps the whole length of the top piece supported, but fixing it isn't that simple as it's not got enough depth to screw into.

To get around it, pop rivets with washers at every hole hold it in place securely and stiffen the top of the back panel.

The front and top are hinged the same way before they're attached to the box itself. The downside of this method is that removing the 'door' is extremely difficult, but it shouldn't be necessary.

When the Box is in use the door needs to stay up, propped on the top edges as the cables will come through the front as the server and switch will need airflow.

The door also has a hole in the front to make opening it easier, Another 1" forstner hole is enough for the weight of the door.

And a couple of notches in the top stop the door sliding down onto the cables.

With airflow in mind, the back also needs to be cut for exhaust to allow air from the switch out and power and uplink cable ingress.

Once again, the router makes short work

Not much more to do now (at least not on the list anyway, many hours) and it'll be finished*
(* Finishing is neither guaranteed nor 100% likely to avoid a v2 being made)

Last job for this visit to the workshop is some wheels, this'll make it far easier to load into the car, as well as the cupboard.

Finally, fully loaded ready to be packed in the car and brought home.

LAN In A Box - Part 4, Handle it!

It's all well and good having everything in a box for convenience, but if you can't move it some where easily, then it'll never get there. As always, the amount of effort to do something will eventually put you off doing it, so making things easier at the start is always a plus.

With this in mind, and knowing that the box would be easily a two-man lift, handles were always going to be important. More so how they're added as space is limited for both storage and transportation. 

Fixed handles screwed/bolted to the side work, but they'll almost certainly get broken, or break something when they come together with some other object, like a wall, a door frame or a shin. So I opted for cut outs in an arc shape to mirror the inside of the hand. 

First up a template, a 1" forstner bit to make a couple of holes in some plywood...

Then a jigsaw to cut the arc's free hand after a bit of rough marking.

The template clamped onto the side of the box and some swift work with the router to clear the center, followed by a round over bit to smooth the edges...

And it's done. Feel comfy in the hand and should make moving it a lot easier. If I did it again, i'd probably consider some recessed handles like you'd find on a flight case which pop out, but even those aren't perfect for every situation.

Next up power. with the switch roughly where I wanted it, the space to the left had ample room for two 4-ways, 7 sockets total for a single external plug. And there's enough height for a socket mounted power-brick to fit.

I remembered an awesome trick from the internets for this. Photocopy the back of the 4-way, receive scale drawing of the holes to mount with. Genius!

There should almost certainly be another picture here, but I can't find it, you'll just have to accept that they fit for the time being and everything is fine. :)