Home Server Rooms?

Tuzanor writes "I've got a buddy moving into a brand new house. Being geeks, we've decided to wire the house with a large home network. While this story took care of wiring the house, we need to figure out how to create a well set up server room. We'll be having both towers and rack mounted computers as well as various switches, UPSes, etc. Also, we figure this room will get warm, even in winter. How may we cool it while still keeping the rest of the house toasty warm on a cold Canadian night (without opening a window)"

Comments

Come on...

[GigsVT]

Is this a serious question?

Just set up the ventilation system to suck warm air from the top of the server room, and pipe it to the colder rooms in the house.

For air return, install intakes near the bottom of some of the colder rooms.

It would cost like $50 at a home improvement store to get enough flexible ducting and registers.

Go to a surplus site like www.mpja.com and get some AC powered fans with a good CFM output.

Re:electricity

[J.C.B.]

There's still no reason to waste it. He lives in Canada, I live in North Dakota, I could use the heat put out by a server room during the winter. It would sure save on heating.

Use The Heater, and a Few Other (Odd) Ideas

[MBCook]

Why not run ducts behind all the computers and have those ducts be the intake from outside for the heater? That way, the air comes in cold, get's warmed up (so your heater doesn't have to do as much) and cools the computers/room (serving it's purpose), then it's business as usual.

Another suggestion is that when I lived in Salt Lake City our house had water heating. What if you ran pipes behind the computers with fins on the pipes (like a heatsink) then that water could go into the hot water heater. Once again, saving you some money.

Where is the room located physically? Don't forget that an underground external room (as opposed to a room in the middle of the house) will be cooler.

Being true geeks, you're probably not opposed to spending some moolah on this. What about doing something like this guy did? If you buried a few large tanks deep the ground deep so it's below the frost line, you'd get cold water for free. Then just hook all you're PCs into water cooling. Have them all draw from the same spot, and then all empty back in. That way you get free cooling and it'd be quiet. If you look back at my earlier suggestion involving the water heater, you'd be all set.

Re:It's all about design

[Kymermosst]

You know, geeking out now and then is cool and all, but why, exactly, do you need this much server equipment for a "home network?"

Personally, I have ONE well-configured machine acting as the firewall, the router, and the file server. There would be a seperate machine providing external 'net service (HTTP) if I could think of any damn good reason I needed a web server at my house.

So, one well-configured machine with 2 NICs, one 8-port ethernet switch and a DSL modem equals: one short Cat5 cable to the DSL modem, 4 power cables (one for the seldom-used monitor), and 8 Cat5 cables run to the rest of the house.

What you and almost everyone else is describing here is more of what you'd find in much more commercial places, and a bit overkill if you ask me. My single-machine setup works just fine, and the advantage of one machine is that you DON'T need any additional cooling.

All of it fits in a closet, and I can work with the server from any part of the house with a tektronix X-terminal, or the computer that happens to be there.

So, I guess I wonder where the advantage is of having enough machines to have to design it so that people get a "feeling" of what my machines' duties are visually? What's the point of having a huge NOC in your house?

Is there a point, or is it just merely to geek-out to the point of overkill, which I can also respect, but can't logically submit myself to?

Separation of firewall and application duties

[Bronster]

Personally, I have ONE well-configured machine acting as the firewall, the router, and the file server. There would be a seperate machine providing external 'net service (HTTP) if I could think of any damn good reason I needed a web server at my house.

I personally have two machines - one being nothing but a firewall and router and the other being all those handy services that you need on a home network (file storage, DNS, web proxy, testing DB and web server, etc).

There are good reasons for this split of duties:

• The firewall is running a minimal setup - no setuid binaries, no listening to arbitary ports (port 22 is the only open port, and even that is only opened on the internal interface), no wu-ftpd or whatever the latest insecure daemon is (oh yeah - no public BIND!!!).
  
• I frequently mess with the config of my internal server, trying something different, upgrading to new versions of software. It's hard to keep a system secure under these changes. I very rarely touch the firewall box.
  
• Attackers have to break two different machines (which should be running two different OSen, but I'm lazy, and LRP based firewall systems are easier than picobsd for what I want) to get access to anything. The router machine only has 16Mb of memory, and boots off a floppy - it's even going to be hard for the attacker to copy a binary in, with no wget or similar installed. If it gets broken, I just hit the reset button, and the write-protected floppy has the same config (which I guess I'd want to check anyway, for how they got in).
  

In summary - home networks needs 2 machines - one providing security, one providing services.

Insulate the rest of your house

[axelbaker]

Unless I am mistaken you said you live in Canada. The land of ice and snow (according to what I am told). Why are you worried about your computers overheating? Spend the extra $$ you are thinking about for cooling your computers on EXTRA insulation for the rest of the house!!! The $$ saved over the life of the house will pay off big time and you will help the environment by spending less fossil fuels on heating and cooling. Also, invest in spending $$ on computers the produce less heat, and use less power. Use less monitors, and KVM switches. Your 100 watt 21" monitor uses tons more power and produces tons more heat than that 5 watt Athlon. If they must produce heat, have it use the heat for good. The suggestions of using the heat to feed the inlets on the heaters is VERY GOOD. The thoughts of cooling using underground water reservoirs is one of the CHEAPEST CLEANEST methods of cooling the whole house around. If you spend the $$ on an energy efficient house now, while it is cheap, you will be much happier in the long run.