Turning A Basement Into A Big Linux Server Room

[Luke]

I built thing too as a kid, though not houses

As a GC that statement is scary. A hard hat required site would be lunacy to bring a 9 yo to and even general house construction is no place for a 9 yo.. whomever brought you there is insane. Of course
by construction sites you could mean a wide range of construction but typically, unless you stayed by the trucks any kind of demo or even framing/roofing/walling seems too hectic and dangerous for a small child.

When I was ten, my father got a 25 foot wooden boat for about $2,000. When we pulled it out of the water at the end of the first season we found a rotten transom and a rusted-out gas tank. My father and I decided to take the bull by the horns and replace that rotten transom (back wall on a boat) and gas tank. I knew damned well this would work because this was just a bigger version of what I had done many times on homemade model boats: attach a solid wood board to the last frame of a wooden hull, Hell, this time I did not have to build the frames as well!

Everyone in the boat yard thought that boat would never go out again. With the paint stripped and the stern (rear end) open, even my mother thought it was finished. They were so wrong: my father and I used the old rotten piece as a pattern to make a new transom, then in a single day's work session applied calk to the frame it seats against, held the new piece in place, and sank in the brass screws to hold it. The hull was now ready for paint, and the gas tank was changed too. We used that boat until my father died of cancer from cigarettes, and proved all the naysayers wrong.

Thankfully there was nobody around to complain that a ten year old didn't belong in the boatyard!

[opensource]

Used to it? It's actually not that bad.... will record a video sometime.

Good project. Noise would probably be my biggest problem (that's one of the reasons why it's in a basement). Scientifically, one can't get used to noise and noise is going to make one very sick. I have an open PC case and a 900 grams CPU cooler without any fan and even in a benchmark test the temperature is like up to 55-65 ?C (84W TDP) only. So it may be possible not to use any fan at all or you could use a very quiet one.

[nightmarex]

Didn't expect so much feedback. Sorry if I sounded like I didn't believe him that wasn't my intent, as he stated @9 he was picking up scraps,etc... If you guys saw some of the roofs and chimneys I work on you would understand that it isn't a place for children that young. It was just the way he worded it had me picturing a 9 yo standing on jacks on a 10/12 pitch roof feeding shingles or something. My daughter is 11 she has only been to a few job sites of mine, once in a while I will let her come up a ladder or if it's a finishing job (drywall) she likes to watch as I proceed to splatter compound all over my shoes but I am admittedly overprotective.

To all the people stating mid teens on roofs. Indeed that's when I started too but about that age you start getting big enough to move small ladders and hump shingles or hammer. I don't know what else to say but I believe you, I believe you ALL! =(

[DrYak]

About regretting Cat6 cables

As an alternative to Cat6 cables:

There's a local (Swiss) small startup providing affordable plastic-optical-fiber (POF) running at gigabit speeds: http://casacom.ch/.
Looks like an interesting alternative to copper cables when wanting to link, for example: your office with a cabinet in the basement.

(plastic fiber is much cheaper than glass fiber. It's transparent enough in the visible domain so can be used with plain red-light emitters (glass fiber use 1 or 2 infra-red wavelenghts) at an acceptable speed (1Gbps in this hardware, literature shows that 10Gbits and more has been experimentally achieved). Connection is as simple a connecting a speaker cable (compared to crimpling Cat6 cables).

I'm personally considering it for cabling our apartment.

[grigi]

Michael, I was actually surprised that you put fake tiles in your server room. Laminates insulate somewhat, whereas tiles are both cheaper and heat conductive. Putting tiles on the bottom floor tends to make those rooms cooler, because the earth is acting as a heat-sink. (Which I thought would be useful for that room)

Of course it would make the place more sound-reflective.

And well done in getting into the news at the age of ten! That is pretty impressive :-)

[sorbus]

Hi Michael,

Really impressive job - well done, it looks very professional! I'd love to do something similar, though it will require saving up first as I can't do as much of it myself. Out of curiosity, what is the total square footage (or meterage) of the basement (or the space you had to play with, in case that is a subsection of the basement)?

Thanks,

Cam

[DrYak]

There's a local (Swiss) small startup providing affordable plastic-optical-fiber (POF) running at gigabit speeds: http://casacom.ch/.
{...}
I'm personally considering it for cabling our apartment.

If it interests somebody: I've done my tests.

Gigabit over POF works very well. It's indeed as simple as manipulating speaker cables.
Note: the default POF fiber proposed by the company I've mentionned is Step-Index PMMA. On slightly longer distances (~15m) it can be a little bit picky (doesn't like turns and bends that are too tight) and might degrade to 100Mbits performance. I needed to adjust the fiber a bit before every thing ran at 1Gbps.
There are Graded-Index PMMA sellers around. That's much more resilient and can work a 1Gbps more easily at longer distances without needing to adjust.

[dbmuse]

I use wire frame shelving with wheels. I can easily roll the units away from the wall for access and cabling between shelves is easy. plus the cost is cheap. for instance at lowes 5 shelve unit for 60 bucks, plus wheels for another 20. http://www.lowes.com/pd_71034-80752-...ctions+shelves. I'm running lenovo ts140 and hp mini servers which are very quiet machines.