Hardening PCs for Hostile Environments?

labradore asks: "I must install a 1.2GHz Athlon system, in a secure place, at a retail business. The PC is going to be a security video recorder and a point of sale terminal server. In other words I need it to act like an appliance: something that requires very little on-site maintenance and at most, remote adminstration. Unfortunately the only secure place to put it is inside a hot, dusty storage room. It has it's own protective lock-box (approx. 3x3x3 ft.) to keep evil employees and snooping types out and to insulate it from the heat and dust of the storage room but I don't know how to actually keep the box cool and fairly free of dust." What things would one need to house comodity components in such a way to enable them to survive in such hostile environments? Is 27 cubic feet too small for the necessary modifications that would have to be made?

"There must be a lot of other people turning PCs into "embedded" controllers or appliances facing the same situations. At the very least this could be thought of as the quest for the ultimate "fire-and-forget" cooling environment. What options has the collective mind of Slashdot uncovered and thunked up to deal with this kind of situation?"

Comments

Simple solution

[kneecap]

Under-clock the processor, and use filters on the fans pulling air in. This will work for a mildly hostile environment. Perhaps using multiple 120mm fans and washable filters, then you might be able to get away with a room tempurature 90F (32C) degrees. If the tempurature is going to be higher than that and the air dirtier than filters can handle, then you would need to take more extreme measures.

My OEM style PC with an Athlon 1100 is doing fine in my apartment without air conditioning. It has not had any problems with the room tempurature being in the high 80s. At work we had the air-conditioning for the NOC fail for part of a week end, the tempurature was in the low 90s when we got in there. Nothing crashed and we have not seen any problems with any of the dozen Sun servers nor the few Cisco Routers since then. It was not something I would desire to repeat though.

A home brew method....

[GreyPoopon]

OK, here's a home brew method that hasn't been tried by me, but I believe would work.

You have two problems, dust and heat. Enclosing the unit within a cabinet won't really keep either out. But you CAN solve both problems at the same time. Put the unit into an enclosed cabinet. Have the customer purchase a small chiller with filters, which will probably have to go into a separate (hopefully less dusty) location. Funnel the output from the chiller through some ductwork, and run the other end through a small hole in the cabinet. And presto, you have a positive pressure, cooled environment for your hardware. The cooling takes care of the heat, and the positive pressure keeps the dust out. Hopefully, holes in the cabinet for cables, etc will be enough to keep the pressure regulated, but if not, you can always add some additional small holes. And, BTW, I've seen some chillers that are only about 1 foot deep, 2 feet high and 2 feet wide.

DISCLAIMER: I do not warrant the above information in any way, nor will I accept responsibility if it fails or creates other damage. Use at your own risk!

GreyPoopon
--