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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)"
Has always been my solution of choice. Of course, that only takes care of half the problem. I had considered switching vents. (Hey, if it works for 10baseT...) These could reroute the air to wherever it needed to be.
if you DON'T cool it, you also solve the problem of your staying warm on those cold winter nights...
--
fight global cooling
You could try to invite some cool chicks.
Would it be possible to install a ceiling vent fan, similar to those found in bathrooms used to vent steam? If you could do that, and possibly keep a window open a crack (just enough to balance the outside cold with the inside heat so it's comfortable), then close the door to the room, you'll be all set.
-kidlinux.
As far as heat is concerned, I wouldn't worry too much. Given the extreme lack of sexual activity associated with wiring your house with switches, UPSes, and god-knows what other geek toys, your house should stay plenty cold throughout the year, especially during the winter.
The pomposity of the professor is inversely proportional to the difficulty and importance of the subject being taught.
Well, I recently converted what used to be a 10'x6' pantry in my basement into a server room.
I tore out all of the old shelves, and picked up a bunch of nicer ones from Revy to hold my main servers and my (still nonfunctional) cluster, and screwed them into one of the longer walls. Opposite that, I used some of the old shelves to
make a small workbench, and I left room to add 2 or 3 racks (not that I'll ever need that much space) at a later date. It works really well, and because it used to be a pantry, and 2 of the walls are bare concrete, as is the floor, its stays down right COLD in there, even with 10 or so boxes going.
At my office, we've got a ceiling mounted AC unit. It hangs from the drop ceiling, and I imagine it's less expensive than a full home-cooling AC unit, so probably no more than 500 bucks, maybe much cheaper. But it keeps our server room at a crispy 50 degrees F with minimal chill seeping out (so insulate the door).
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.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
Is there any real reason why you can't just buy a couple of those big basement freezers and put them in there? It can't be too hard to put in extra lights if you need them, and I guess some silica dessicant would be a good thing to have in there too...
After all, it is only a home server room. ;-)
Security through promiscuity is no better than security through obscurity.
Something to consider: in California right now, electricity runs $0.10 to $0.25 per kw/hour. That means the cost per 100 watts of 24/7 computer equipment is between $7 and $23 per month. Easy ouch.
Next, don't be a cooling idiot. If it's cold outside and your server room is hot, use the server room to warm the rest of the house. Air circulation. Central placement of server room in basement.
I'm not necessarily/unqualifiedly recommending that, but if you're already using tons of electricity to run all this useless equipment, you'll just have to use that much again to cool it all. Just keep a window open. I know the abstract said otherwise, but I think he should think again.
There are a few of ways to do it:
1) Shut off the incoming heating vents to the room in the Winter. Then reopen them in the summer when you don't heat your house, or when you have the AC on.
2) Make sure any outgoing vents are open so that air from the room is circulated out.
3) Fans in the window (in case the room really gets hot.)
4) Thermostat controlled fans or AC unit in the window.
Take care,
Brian
--
We are almost out of Free Palm Pilots...
--
Even better, put it in the bathroom, put your servers in the shower and just run water on them. Having them in that bathroom makes it easier to surf for pr0n while on the hopper.
Why not? Install a louvered thermostatically controlled exhaust fan and provide a louvered intake opening a few feet away. You want hinged louvers that close by gravity and are pushed open by the air from the fan.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Start with two racks, fill them with servers, Put the towers in the middle. Now, stuff those in to a small closet. You're running these all a bit OC'd, right? Great, now got to the store and pick up a product called "Cake Mix." Follow the directions on the box. It will likley need milk, water, and eggs. Put this solution in a pan and then you've got an oven that can play quake.
There are exactly 42,935,718 letter sized sheets in a square mile.
Why not just spread everything around? That way heat won't build up in a single room.
You'll definately want your connection dropped to that room, that's my first suggestion, or you'll go nuts later and kick yourself forever. Depending on the number of 1/2U systems you'll be using, a short stack can be easily hidden in a custom made (well-ventilated) box in the corner, complete with slide out racks(think drawers). I assume you'd also have at least one more workstation in this room, prolly more than that by the sounds of it, for lan gaming when friends come over and such (as you probably don't want to leave them alone in your daughters room while you frag them from your cushy den:). What I would do is find a nice counter-top that you like and build a wrap-around counter on two of the walls, meeting at a corner; this leaves plenty of center room space for big-leather-rolly-chairs-wars. You can easily hide all the towers, UPSs and cables under the counter, leaving tons of leg room, with everything else up top(obviously). I cool mine(let's just say I hear what you're asking) with an hotel wall-mount AC, which I picked up cheap from a place that was about to be torn down, YMMV.
Plug everything in and invite the neighbors, cheers.
put the what in the where?
Personally, I've got my boxen sitting within inches of the furnace and I've had them there for months without a problem. I live in Seattle, about 125 miles from the Canadian border so the climate is somewhat similar. Unless your buddy is looking at putting in loads of servers and other equipment I can't imagine that you'd have a problem. If you really want to 'do it right' you can usually get most manufacturers to give you the heat output rates for their equipment in BTUs per hour. Add all the rates together then you'll have an idea of how bad things are likely to get. I would imagine you'd have more problems with too much heat then not enough; it might not be a bad idea to check the room where the rack is going to go and verify that it has adequate ventilation to carry the heat load. Stick a wall-mounted thermometer in and see how it goes over time.
One thing that you should really think about with rack equipment is the noise level. Manufacturers of rack-mounted equipment just love to shove lots and lots of fans in the backsides of their boxes; this tends to make a great deal of unwanted noise. Unless the plan is to have all this stuff in a separate room where no one is going to be in you might want to consider spending the extra money and get a glass or plastic enclosed rack. It costs more but hey, it definitely has the cool factor covered.
Why didn't you just ask a local heating/cooling company? There several ways to handle it... depending on the size of the house, you can have multiple systems, or have dampers in the the ventilation system that can control the air flow to each rooms (with multiple thermostats).
Looking for any old 8-bit Heathkit/Zenith software/hardware - http://heathkit.garlanger.com
Concrete is interesting; its supposed to insulate, but for some reason it breathes cold air. The house I just bought was built during the Cold War and has an interesting room in the basement: the walls and ceiling are thick concrete. The temperature stays rather cool with all the electronic equipment running and I had to put in a quartz heater just to stay comfortable.
You want a cramped, untidy little room, with a stack of buzzing boxen to the left (from the bottom: OpenBSD, Linux, Cisco IOS, topped off with an old 15" monitor). No KVM - that's cheating; you have to scrabble around amongst the spaghetti cabling to switch the monitor to another box. Keep spare kbd's, mice etc draped over the monitor or propped against the wall when not in use; with the lights off, those three extra LEDs on the keyboard add to the girlfriend-impressing "Starship Enterprise" look'n'feel. To the right, balanced on top of the tower system housing your main workstation, you want an old analogue modem, and a desktop switch of some sort. Make sure the CAT5 from the rest of the house terminates just behind this switch - that way you get to mix the network cables up with the PSU, parallel cable->backup device, serial extenstions, phone plug-thrus etc. Top with stacks of unread magazines - New Scientist, Perl Journal etc - a couple of rows of books (remember to break the O'Reilly hegemondy with a carefully placed K&R, the Conway book, perhaps something on OO, SQL, firewalls, IDS and network security. Season with a sprinkling of "carefully filed" hardcopies of whitepapers, Slashdot stories, tech specs, man pages, discussions on the use of IGMP in scanning.
Remember to get the carpet professionally steam-cleaned once or twice a year. Remember to empty the waste basket and remove uneaten food and drink containers.
Cover the walls in Dilbert cartoons, printouts of UserFriendly, inadvertently amusing advertising materials, color "maps of the internet", and the SANS "Network Security Roadmap" poster (change every six months!)
My personal shelter from the world, which looks just like this of course, copes with (a) having no radiators (or windows) by being right in the core of the building, so avoiding getting too hot in summer; and (b) avoiding getting too cold in winter (it's below zero outside, here in the UK at present) by housing the central heating boiler.
At one point I seriously contemplated moving a campbed in here to save rent (I'm unemployed, & live in a shared house.) But my girlfriend said she'd cut my balls off, and then leave me. So that was that
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
build a simple wooden shack adjecent to the house, with no insulation of any kind. put everything there. run wires from that shack to inside the house (maybe through a window that's been packed with some insulation).
ideally, you'd want everything outside for temperature reasons during the winter, but you'd probably have to cool them in the summer and you would still have to shield them from the elements during harsh winters -- hence, a shack.
FreeBSD for the impatient.
Check out geothermal cooling. Dig about 5 - 7 feet down into the ground and you've got a consistent temperature *year 'round*. The temperature happens to be ideal for cooling in the summer and heating in the winter.
It'd be *ultra geek* if you could set up a processor cooler based on this technology.
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
I'm on my 3rd house, which like the previous ones is automated and has several servers, switches, UPSs, etc running 24/7. The truth is that there is not *that* much excess heat generated in a typical scenario. Sure, you can pile up lots of servers to do odd jobs, just to try and make it look like some mini server-room, but that's hardly cost effective, or efficient.
Without knowing the size of the room, the approximate BTU output of the machines and devices, and the heat loss factors of the room, nobody can *really* make any informed decisions.
My sever room and wiring closet is about 6' x 12', which was also about the size of my previous room. I don't do anything special to control airflow or temp. I *do* have a temp sensor in there to monitor things, just in case, but I've found that it tends to stay at about 65F in the winter and about 77F in the summer. Hardly worth spending tons of money to try and regulate the temperature better, I'd rather invest in another lighting controller or touchscreen
-This sig intentionally left blank
(without opening a window)
What's wrong with opening a window? I know, I know, everybody here loves Linux, but aren't you getting carried away here?
Give a man a fish and he eats for one day. Teach him how to fish, and though he'll eat for a lifetime, he'll call you a miser for not giving him your fish.
Terrorists can't threaten a country's freedom and democracy. Only lawmakers and voters can do that.
A good home server room is just as good as the design behind it. That's probably why it's an AskSlashdot question. An apt one, too.
In my home, I set up my server room before we even officially moved in. I can get pics if people desire, but I'll give the gist here.
First, it needs to be in the basement. Some people think it's only a heat issue, but the reality is that server rooms are noisy. I've only got four machines whirring about, and that alone is enough to sound like a wind tunnel.
Second, build shelving such that you can walk around it and access equipment from the rear. How many tower cases have RJ-45 connectors on the front side? Didn't think so. I built shelving out of 2x4's, 3/4" plywood, lag bolts, and drywall screws. Some day I'll get around to putting formica all over everything (it's not that expensive and easy to do). Everything is strong enough to hold me jumping up and down without any wiggle.
Third, carefully design how your wires are going to run. Raceways are a great idea, though you can also go the cheap route and use ziptie loops that have screw holes. Also, network wires should not be in the same raceway (and not parallel) to power cables.
Finally, place your equipment. Servers should be placed where they most make sense, e.g. don't put the internal file server next to the router and the public webserver on the other end. People should get a "feeling" of what your machine's duties are visually. Also, keep networking gear all in the same area--hubs, switches, and even modems and your incoming ISP equipment. That's also the best place for your router.
In addition, consider a KVM. They really are helpful, and cut down a lot on heat (and space needs). Some even have remote extenders--with mine I can work on any machine in my server room from my desktop in my office area. Definitely beats working in the wind tunnel.
Long, cute, or funny Sigs are just another form of over compensation, used by geeks, nerdz, etc.
I have three computers living in a very tiny closet, which would normally kill all three. The trick I used was that the closet has a removable insulated panel which leads to a non-insulated crawl space. By leaving the panel open by varying degrees I can control the temperature in the closet to reasonable while not freezing my ass off outside of it.
;-)
Another solution if you don't ned physical access, just leave them in an uninsolated room and close the door. Warning though, watch out for the bugs
Bye!
I am dead serious when I tell you know I know two people who run a very successful consulting firm around my ara who have their servers in a bathroom inside their house. When I asked them why they put them there, the answer was "We don't use this bathroom, it's in the middle of the house, and it's the most secure since it has no windows in it."
:)
Ask serious questions, get slightly stupid answers
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.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
Waste heat removal should he either to the exterior of the house in summer or the interior in winter. If you paid for it, you might as well use it to heat your house and not pay twice. Likewise, ventalation to the outside will keep your room within reason unless you get 90+ days where you are. Most commercial server rooms are in the "service core" of a building, do not have the luxery of ready access to lots of cool exterior air and can't do this.
You will want to make sure that you run some sort of humidification in the room. You may wish to include a belt humidifier into your air ducting.
The exhaust fan sounds better to me -- most equipment is designed to be air-cooled in a cool-room-temp environment, so dragging the house-air through the room makes sense.
If you want to get really wild -- insulate the interior walls and cut a window, then mount a window air conditioner across the interior wall to pump heat from the server room into the house proper, recycling instead of dumping.
11 1GHz+ computers, 2 old workstations, 48 ports of Catalyst goodness and an external RAID enclosure. Most of it in a 10x12 room.
First thing is: Open a goddamn window. Block vents if you're worried about screwing up your heating/cooling bill. Get a little Window AC for summertime - not that you're going to get 100 F summer days in Canada, but just in case you need it. The windows in my apartment building are extra-wide, so I have two box fans sitting side-by-side in my window, one blowing air in, the other blowing out.
Scrounge a rack if you have to - the kind musicians use is cheaper than the ones computer people pay for. I pulled mine out of a dumpster at an Exodus NOC. I have a number of the identical tower cases - so I stacked them at the bottom of the rack, and started the rackmount stuff I have (a disk array, a catalyst 5005, KVM, and big ol' UPS) above that.
Rack-mount stuff costs too much money but I love having everything in one place. I'll bet wooden shelves would be just fine if I didn't have stuff that fit inside the rack already.
A $30 "Hobby" labelmaker works great for keeping cables straight. That and a whole bunch of chicken-straps (cable ties) and variety of velcro implements should be considered essential.
Noise is a big problem for me. I lined the inside of some of my louder PCs with dynamat and carpet scraps, but that doesn't help with all the whiny SCSI disks. Not much I can say there. Maybe another ask Slashdot? In the past I wouldn't consider carpet in an area with lots of computers, but since I'm at home, I'm thinking maybe the noise-deadening features of a good, thick carpet might be a good thing.
I don't pay for electricity (obviously!). I have no idea how much all this stuff costs to run. All my machines are on a UPS, though, which is handy. $99 500VA generic units are better than nothing at all. There's a pretty big electrical load in my tiny little apartment, but I'm lucky in that my computer room has, for some reason, outlets on three different circuits. I should think that having outlets on two circuits would be a minimum, particularly if you're in an apartment or older home, where tripping a breaker is either easier or more likely than a new home.
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
" Uh, it says in the abstract "(without opening a window). Who looks stupid now? :)"
:)
Why would diging a big hole in the floor require opening a window?
Do you already have all this equipment, or are you planning to kit out the room after you move in?
.13 micron version of the Athlon MP comes out, you can get a speed boost and a heat reduction in one go, so I'd get the cheapest Athlon MP chips available.) With that amount of CPU horsepower you can do Linux software RAID for free (just make sure each IDE drive has its own controller, i.e. only one drive per cable) and still have lots of power left over for running server software.
If you plan ahead, you ought to be able to set up with all the gear you need, without using too much power/making too much heat.
Start with one big Linux server. Equip it with a ridiculous amount of RAID storage: how about 3 or 4 80 GB drives in a RAID 5 configuration; that's 160 GB or 240 GB right there. Use a 2-processor SMP Socket A motherboard, and a couple of Athlon MP chips. (When the
Now I assume you want some number of other computers for various purposes. At a minimum you want one firewall. If you want a server exposed to the net you really want two firewalls, with the net server behind one and your really big Linux server behind both firewalls (and the second one should be really locked down!). For these extra computers, you ought to look at using the Shuttle SV24, with a VIA C3 chip. The SV24 has little expansion capability, so it only has a little power supply, so it only makes a little heat. The C3 dissipates about as much power as a night light ( 7 Watts) typical and 11 Watts max according to the Via web site. You don't even need a fan on the heatsink: a simple passive heatsink is enough for a C3! For firewall use, put an extra net card in the single PCI slot on the SV24.
Because Linux can boot off a floppy (try that with Windows XP Professional Server sometime) you can set up the SV24 boxes with just a floppy and a whole lot of memory. If you can get a net boot working with the built-in 100 Mbps Ethernet, you don't even need the floppy.
Of course your personal workstation/gaming boxes can run hot with fast CPUs and fast 3D graphics cards and such, but those probably won't be in the server room!
Unless you are planning to invest in a render farm or Beowulf cluster, you should be able to get everything you need running, and it shouldn't get too hot.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Liebert maked a self-contained rack with built in air conditioning and UPS. Details here.
Someone doesn't know their thermodynamics, hmmm....
The heat that is coming out the back is exactly equivalent to the heat that is being lost inside of the appliance, causing the decrease in temperature.
Apparently you don't know your thermodynamics either. The heat coming out the back of an air conditioner must be more than that being lost by the room (thank you Sadie Carnot). Usual efficiencies expressed as COD are around 2.0-3.0 meaning that about 30-50% more than the amount of heat removed from the room is coming off the back end of the air conditioner.
Ummm, you don't bury the computers, you bury about a mile of poly tubing, and circulate a water / glycol mix. Hook that up to an old AC core (or a new one, it's your money...) and you
have yourself a basic heat transfer system. Add a compressor and you have a heat pump. Big project, and expensive (cost of digging deep enough and tubing). If you heat / cool you whole house this way, it may pay for itself.
What I did for my room, was add a few electic dampers, duct blowers, thermostats, and a few relays and you have yourself a REALLY simple climate conrtol system.
You have 4 ducts: exhaust to outside, fresh outside air (filtered), furnace (a/c), and furnace return. Use thermostats to control which ducts are active based on temps inside, outside, etc.
When it's cold outside, you have free AC. When it's warm, you tap off the main house AC. Dual zone control on furnaces are common. I don't care how cold it gets in the room, so heating isn't required (it doesn't get below 30 outside here, and the server room. You can't actually recycle the waste heat as the room is ALWAYS cooler than I normally keep the rest of the house.
I actually have a new modern furnace and A/C that can run at 3 different levels which works awesome for this project. I also have an electronic air cleaner, and run the blower 24/7/365 filtering the house air (allergies...)
Heat /p4 servers), the equipment can probably survive without active room cooling. Internal cooling of the cabinets may have to be beefed up, especially multi harddisk systems (cheap to do though).
/at jobs.
/router at night, is probably the safest firewall you can get;-)
Unless the room is broom-closet sized, or you got a lot of equipment (more than 5 or 6 Athlon
Perhaps some creativity may help too. Perhaps some of the systems doesn't need to run 24/7.
Some BIOS's have an internal timer and calender, so you can shutdown the systems when likely not in use.
WoL (Wake on LAN) to remote boot, suspend or shutdown systems can be nice too (almost all nics and mobos support WoL nowadays).
Hook it up with some X10 gadgets and a sensor, so that the system(s) boot, if you go near your bedroom console at night, or you alarm clock goes of in the morning, or if you start your coffe machine after 2 o'clock in the night, or...
Other power management features may be present in the OS, so you can suspend the entire system, or just the harddisks, by a cron
Not only will you save some money, but the room will run cooler too.
And unless you run your own DNS, mailserver, etc, then a shut down firewall
Dust
This is my nemesis at the moment, our server room is in a basement, with an untreated cement floor.
I suspect our DAT and some other stuff, died because of the cement dust (ok, so DATs always break down after a short while, but..). Anyway, fans and PSU's seems like dustmagnets, which again leads to worse internal component cooling, so a clean room, without carpets is my recommendation.
Noise
All your equipment will make an infernal noise, and a generally bad indoor clima in the room. Of course, people have very individual sensitivity to this, but personally I prefer to hack outside the serverroom.
I final note, if you run a Linux box, then I can only recommend netsaint, from www.netsaint.org.
It is a very flexible, very reliable monitoring system. Since it checks services with plugins, it is easely extensible to include eg. room temperature measurement. Netsaint is simply the best of the pack.
Oh, a minor thing more; we have never regrettet our small investment in a handheld labeling machine. A small label saying "Cross-over" on a Cat cable or "UPS" on a power cord, saves a lot of trouble.
Warning: If you start goofing with airflow throughout an entire house/furnace system be very aware that you could cause carbon-monoxide levels to build up.
It shouldn't be too difficult for you to set up some thermostatic switches to control the system. Just make it blow cold air (even from outside) into the server room when it's needed and blow the hot air into the rest of the furnace system when you need that in the rest of the house.
If the server room is going to be in the basement, you probably could just put a blower vent going into the main flume from near the ceiling of the server room, and then spill the cold air from the rest of the house (or just some of it) into the server room, again from the ceiling. Then it'll be the coolest room in the house, and not just because it has a bunch of computers!
Here's another tip, put the hot-air sucker near the outside wall, and the cold air blower nearer to the center of the house. That'll keep the air moving and thermoclining (layers of different temp air).
Good luck!
My Karma was at 49, then they switched to words. All that work for nothing!
Well you have a furnace don't you. I have a fairly spacieous and well sealed furnace room. In your instance take advantage of that.
:] ). An
Go to Home Depot get a register T and insert it into the cold air intake coming into the room. Add a booster fan ( be sure that is sucking air down and not blowing it up, its a cool idea to suck all that warm air out... its also a cool idea to keep that furnace with enough oxygen so it doesnt' go and kill you with carbon monoxide.)I left the remainder of the intake pipe going back down to the furnace so I was simply tapping into the air supply and not diverting the entire flow.
Next create a simple register system that blows down on the back of the systems, get some straight register pieces and some elbows, its just like connecting straws together. The furnace should easiely handle the excess heat ever time it kicks in. You can also throw in a standard thermostat in and set the furnace fan to summer mode, so it will kick in whenever the temp goes above a certian tempature.
Now you could also go a step further and encase the systems into a sealed box ( essentially we thought about getting some plywood and making like a small sealed shed in my furnace room, and then forcing the air out with a second fan that would runn the air directly to the air intake of the furnace.) The only warning is don't try and force the exhausted air out through the chimmney for the furnace... why you ask.. because you don't wanna mess it up and again...and say, flood your house with deadly generally unnoticable furnace exhaust.
and then attatching a standard register booster fan to my incoming air chimmey ( which anyone with a furnace will have its required by law, although i don't know if modifying it is legal..
If you can't fix it ask the 3 year old down the street.
I think this is they key. If you put your stuff in a naturally cool room with normal ventilation, you'll be fine.
The dude that posted the comment about cost of electricity for your servers made a good point. I estimate that my router and mp3 server cost me at least $20/month. I'm working on setting up power management for them, since they're not needed from like 2am - 8p.
Too big to fail? Does that make me to small to succeed?
Related, anyone know where I can get inexpensive (or gently used) rack cases, similar to (or exactly) what they use to move around rack-mounted audio gear? Y'know - the felt or carpet padded 19" rack cases on wheels? I've moved so many times over the past few years that I'd be able to make sure my rack mounted gear survives nicely in something like this. Better yet - I can just leave it setup in the case on a permanent basis, and can get rid of the short rack. The online musician's stores have these, but it's more than I'm looking to spend.
Thanks.
I guess most of us reading and posting on this story have several machines at home. I have three machines on "active duty" (main workstation, DSL-gateway and webserver) and two more that are basically collecting dust except for when I want to test something unusual. A number of projects to get them into active use culminated with a beowulf, but that was a short w00t. (Whee, I have a beowulf! Now I can...I can...*crickets*).
Now I'm down to 5 machines, the all-time high was 8, and most of the recent leftovers are being donated to the family instead of ending up in the "next box" box.
Three units makes sense to me. It allows for all sorts of network testing and experimenting, so for a computer professional/hobbyist it's still rational.
What I'd like to know is what use you guys find for that 4th, 5th, 12th machine? I know from personal experience that "just for the heck of it" can be a good motivator to add another old machine the the net, but I'd enjoy it greatly if someone could elaborate on their far-out home setups, and perhaps spread some inspiration to the rest of us?
Place the racks on turntables with bookcases on the other side. Build a nice antique-looking table where the front cover slides to reveal the keyboard(s) and raises the monitors to a comfortable 45 degree reading angle. You've seen the Bond movie: "Just Like Home." Add the door switch or motion sensor for the alarm system so all screens go to screen-saver mode with your official looking logo (RCMP?) popping up as the lighting changes to red. (AKA, a recent JAG episode.) Others have answered the cooling question, but this will have your friends, clients, police, etc, saying "COOL!" Bob
One thing to find out BEFORE you begin mounting expensive electronic equipment down in your nice, cool basement is:
HOW PRONE ARE YOU TO FLOODING?
My parents place was in a well developed subdivision with one decent power drop and one shitty one. Guess which one they were on?
So every time they'd get a bit of rain, BOOM. Out would go the power in their place, and every place down the right-hand side of the block. While our next door neighbors off to the left (and down the left side of the block (we were at the end of a cul-de-sac) had power.
Consequently, if this happened in the middle of the night, they'd take on 3-4 feet of water.
If you're in an area that has no flooding problems, you're set. You can drop your setup down in the basement.
If you live in an area that's flood prone, then take the extra time and money to rig the server room on the main floor.
Have a cold-air return in the floor (or low on the wall) blowing directly into the equipment bay. Then (assuming you're in a one story home), have a ceiling ventilation fan above the rack.
You can find a lot of HVAC supplies to improve your climate control here. Look particularly closely at the duct fans.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
we have the same problem in our club's server room (don't all the clubs you go to have a server room?) - but there is no window (=basement). I've been asking for a non-venting AC (little floor model) forever but to no avail so we cut a hole in the wall to the outside and put a $10 fan in it. it did bring the temp down 10 degrees...
closed minded is as closed minded does
My potential server room will be (If my mother agrees, of course) a box of about 0.5*0.5*2 meters located above the passway to the standard micro Soviet kitchen of Khrushchev epoch. Really, in winter (-31 deg. Celsius day temperature NOW) I can drop the heat into the kitchen, it's enough.
But in summer! Street temperatures are higher than +30C, and with my $100/month budget it's difficult to buy a split-system air conditioner.
The decision is very simple: There is always a lot of cold water in the tap. I only need a used car radiator and a fan. Add the thermostatic controller and electromagnetic valve according to taste. The water tariff is flat here, and the water from Lake Baikal is always cold. Of course, if the aquifer is being repaired, you are out of luck.
Wow, the answers you've gotten.
A window unit air conditioner can be found for under a hundred dollars if you catch it on sale.
Everybody from Lowes and Home Depot to K-Mart and Wal-Mart sells them.
So many posts here seem to think it's weird that a geek would want a hardware room. Of course you want a place for all your extraneous electronic crap. And although one tries to buy heat-efficient gear, sometimes you run across something that's too interesting to pass up -- maybe an old rackmount server, maybe a bunch of video editing gear, maybe a pinball machine. And of course, there will be the various routers, modems, etc. that stack up over time. I have in front of me three different DSL routers, for example, plus two analog dialout routers and various modems, that have accumulated from different ISP packages -- when they give you the router for free, you take it. (If you throw it out, inevitably you wind up needing it.) And of course I have several printers, scanners, a plotter, Raritan switchboxes, midi hardware, hubs, an 8-track recorder, and plenty of old 'servers' that are only servers because I don't use them as desktops.
:) Get it?
The comments about window air conditioners sound right, though modern hardware is environmentally very rugged, so if you are using a glorified closet, it's still probably OK. You might consider a little circulation fan to blow hot air into the rafters (I did this in my phone/cable closet).
Bottom line: you may not truly need a server room, but you need a workshop, and it's often easier from the standpoint of spousal harmony to call it a server room: "Honey, we need this for technical reasons."
-- We all have enough strength to endure the misfortunes of other people. La Rochefoucauld
If you have hot air ducts, you can place a fan in them so as to always suck air from the room and distribute heat to the rest of the building. This would be helpful for upper floors, for example.
a better solution would take air from the top of the room, and draw it into the basement, near the floor. This would lead to warmer floors in the morning, and circulate the air and heat through out the house.
Of course, a lot depends on house design, but you get the idea.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Here are a few things that can make a room more livable
Put up a couple of 4 bulb ( 400W ) chandaliers and put them on a dimmer. You can have comfortable dim light for keyboarding etc. or bright light for fishing dammits out of whatyamacallits. I got two of these type of lights from Home Depot closeout in the lighting department for about $25 each.
There is high-capacity adjustable shelving that uses the rails that you screw to the walls and has movable brackets. This makes handy bookshelves above your work surface area.
I organized my room with corner work units in two corners ( seperated by the long wall of the room ) with matching tables between them along the walls and returns on the short side. The side of the room without the computer tables has a book case, a stereo rack and a horizontal filing cabinet with the fax machine and guitar amp on it. Guitars hang on the wall above the amp for easy access. In the center of the room is a dining table - a good place to lay out diagrams, photos or build boxen.
KVM switches for the two main work areas help cut down the clutter, a few other computers have their own monitors etc. Carpet on the floor may not be the best for dust control, but it is cozy for bare-footed living. Get a vacuum with a hepa filter on the exhaust.
If you are building the house and wiring the room for the purpose of being a computer room, think about putting the data outlets up at 36" or so off the floor, so you can wire stuff on the desk without crawling around to pull cables. Remember to pull several dedicated 20 Amp power circuits - figure out what you are going to run and make sure you have enough amps to support it all plus some. Do not let the electrician share the computer room power circuits with other bedrooms or the kitchen.
I have decided to power down stuff I am not using due to the combination of noise and the now high cost of power. $.25 per KWH at the high tier - and I had about 365 KWH of high tier last month! $ 300 electric bill and that is with a gas clothes dryer, water heater and cooktop. ( that is with 11 people in the house however )
If you have the money, consider building photovoltaic co-generation into your home. It might prove very wise over the long term.
enough is too much
Easy, automatic testing for Perl.
I have a good answer for them.
Go to your local HVAC contractor and ask him what to do!!
I say this for two reasons:
1.) They're qualified to tell you a correct answer. Who the hell knows if your talking to a physicist or a 16 year old dropout on slashdot.
2.) Nobody really cares what you do with your home heating, and most people will see this submission as bragging and not much more. Put a fan in your window for all anybody cares. Since when in this type of stuff so important that it needs the attention of a couple hundred thousand geeks.
One thing I haven't seen mentioned that I saw when I worked at IBM was to use a false floor. If you raise the floor 6-12 inches on a simple framework, and use removeable tiles, you can run cables and cords from anywhere to anywhere and not worry about tripping.
In fact, they not only used this technique in their server farms, but also in the production line. When they added on to the line, they dug a 8-foot hole, and then built scaffolding and a false floor. All the plumbing and wiring run under it.
I'd rather have someone respond than be modded up.
I'd like to see someone try positioning their computers by uptime! "Noooo, don't plug the vacuum in there... ah crap."
I took the easy way out. I just decided to run the fan on my HVAC all the time. This does a few things for me:
That which does not kill me only makes me whinier
There are two primary issues that you need to be concerned about - heat removal and electricity. Both of these should be designed into consideration for the room to begin with. Since your building the house, you have an opportunity to deal with these properly to begin with. This should save you thousands of dollars vs trying to hodgepodge things together after the fact.
The first consideration is to make sure that you have an ample supply of electricity to the room. This involves more than just having a bunch of outlets all over the place. The first thing that you MUST do is to have adequate gauge electrical wire running to the room from your circuit box (make sure circuit breakers are adeqaute as well). If this isn't adequate, you won't pass inspection. You can't use the same gauge wire that you can get away in the rest of the house. You need a lower number gauge, and more of it. The primary consequences of failing to do this will be an inability to run everything at once without tripping a circuit breaker. I recommend having at least two dedicated runs of wire to the server room. Make sure their breakers are labeled and control nothing else. Also have a dedicated smoke detector hardwired for this room (the insurance company will like / require this and it will help for your safety as well.
There are also code issues here. If the wiring is inadequate and your house burns down from this (circuit breakers can fail to trip) your insurance company won't pay you a dime. If the electrician tells you not to worry about this, things will be fine, tell him to do it anyways. Follow up on this by physically verifying that the gauge is different. Remember the electrician who does your house is judging by the standard of what the typical urban household needs. It is important to remind him that this is not the typical urban house. If done during construction the cost will be minimal, if done after construction (drywall) the cost will be thousands of dollars. Also consider having one or two 220 volt outlets installed during this time. If you need to install a room air conditioner for your server room you'll need this. You'll also likely want a single heavy duty UPS for all of the equipment vs several smaller ones. Such a UPS will also require 220 Volt power. All of this will probably not add more than $200 if it is done before drywall goes up and while the electrician is on site anyways. One other thought here, make sure said wire gauge differences are documented and signed by the electrician, and then videotape everything before the drywall goes up.
Now that you have power in place you'll want to examine heat removal issues. If you put this in a basement, it will naturally be about 10f cooler. This can be used to your advantage. Keeping this room in the center of the house will also help keep it cooler / warmer for less costs. Keep in mind that the standard home AC unit will not be sufficient to cool such a room. Talk to the HVAC contractor and start by getting dedicated ducts that go to this room only (not a feed from another duct). Tell them what the room while be used for and they can help out, it's something that is pretty common for any contractor that also does commercial work (avoid HVAC contractors that only do residential work like the plague). It will also help if the room has a higher than average ceiling (give the heat somewhere to go) and a ceiling fan to help pull hot air up. You also want to keep the run (length of duct from AC unit to room) as absolutely short as you can get away with.
Consider getting a purpose built building interior air conditioner for the room. They cost about a grand, but don't have to have dedicated ductwork available to them. They are also far cheaper than failed components if you get a sudden hot day that overwhelms your air conditioner. Remember that standard air conditioners are sized to handle not the hottest days in your locality but a point that is 85% - 90% equivalent to the hottest days (there are good reasons for this, but I'd be getting off topic). In other words, don't count on the home AC to handle this room. It's not just a matter of being comfortable, it's a matter of avoiding replacing failed hardware that got too warm. This always ends up costing more than it would cost to do it right in the first place.
Now you can deal with the smaller issues. Make sure you have lots and lots of 4 bang outlets. Also make sure that you have indirect lighting in the room. It may be worthwhile to install some foam for noise absorption while your at it. It's not very expensive and it can make a big difference. You also want to make sure the floor is wood, tile or concrete. Avoid carpet that can create static electricity. Make sure you have your wiring coming to the room through PVC or steel conduit. Make sure the access point isn't going to be blocked. From here I would advise to go ahead and buy a rack. It will save lots of space, the standard is there for many things, and it will make things look much nicer. You can also set up a proper patch panel this way.
Just my 2 and a half cents worth, would add more but this is long as is.
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:
In summary - home networks needs 2 machines - one providing security, one providing services.
Use vinyl storm drain! Less than 25cents/ft, a variety of colors (provided you count beige and white as colors, and "2" as "variety"), and you can get even angled connectors for that anal-tidy look.
You can get fancy brackets, or just buy extra-long drywall screws and drive them through the middle.
Depending on how often you recable, you can either put runs of twine inside for expansion, or cut a lengthwise slit
cheers,
mike
This sounds really cool, but I can't seem to form a good mental image of it. Have you got any diagrams or pictures of your system? Or of the geothermal system?
Dyolf Knip
Being really short on space, I had to move 3 of the servers into the laundry room - since there wasn't any real space there, I stacked them end to end and slid them between the washer/dryer and the wall. I was worried about heat initially, but it hasn't been a problem at all. (The webserver has an uptime of 115 days with no problems.)
I have a picture at http://mmdc.net/servers.jpg
The one on top is 'unagi', the web server and mp3 server. (Redhat 7.1) below that is the router (Freesco) and another test machine below that.
It keeps everything out of sight and quiet and uses the 10cm of space that would be otherwise wasted. I could add probably 3 more if I needed, too.
I use webmin and have VNC on each, so I don't need a keyboard or monitor, but I can put a flatpanel on the metro shelf facing it if the need arises.
Cheers,
Jim in Tokyo
-- My Weblog.
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.
Hum, i'm a poor boy and have only 1 room for me and all my computers, so i'm running 4 computers in my room, i don't care about the noise, but sometimes when i haven't openend a window for a day or so you can smell the computers (electrostatic smell i think :) it doesn't smell that nice, sou i wouldn't heat the other rooms with the hot air from your server room!
Life sucks.
Just as a data point, I have recently consolidated all but one of my servers onto a single little box, drawing a little bit under 100 watts. My UPS can keep this little guy up for two hours during a power outage.
Another point to consider for home server rooms which are not in a basement, is to run all cables up the wall closest to the center of the house - this gives you maximum room when crawling around the ceiling.
So when you are running new cables, or tracing faults or whatever, you aren't cramped down by the pitch of the roof.
I've done this, and while it is *never* fun stuffing around with cables in a roof space, at least if its in the center of the house you can stand up and stretch.
regards,
Duncan
I'll think of a funny sig later on
Usually a "cold air return" is near the floor, as it's intended to remove cold air in the winter. In your server room, have that air return vent connected to openings near the floor and ceiling. Install the type of grill which can be opened and closed, so you can adjust how much air gets pulled from the top and bottom of the room. This lets you keep air circulating, but you now can remove hot air more easily.
Make sure you also run a vent from the furnace to that room, and again have an adjustable grill so you can control how much air enters the room. In the winter you probably want to nearly close it, and allow more of the house air to be drawn through the warm room.
The last thing you need is a Fan Always On switch. Sometimes there is one on the furnace, and sometimes there is one in the thermostat. Leave the fan always on, so you keep air moving and even out the differences.
Last, consider an electronic air filter. This is an electrostatic device installed next to the furnace, in the cold air return. It's a couple of hundred dollars, but it removes well over 90% of stuff floating in the air. If your fan is always running, you also keep running the air through so it is kept nice and clean. You just have to wash the metal filters, no disposable filters to buy. Less dust in the computers.
Quiet SCSI disks: Fujitsu MAJ-series drives. 10k rpm. Reasonably priced, too.
WD Enterprise drives: Again, quiet, and especially cheap, since WD stopped making SCSI drives last summer. TigerDirect's been known to sell new 18GB U160 drives for $99.
The Maxtor Atlas III isn't too bad, either. Very good price/performance.
Most of what I have is, sadly, Seagate Cheetahs and late-model Barracudas. Both models of drives that take soul-killing noise to new levels.
For very-nearly as good operation out of IDE drive, the Maxtor 740X and WD1x00xB drives are great. Very quiet, speedy, and with enormous capacity (80 and 100/120 GB, respectively).
Seagate ATA Barracuda IVs literally don't make noise, but performance is tepid at best - a WD 600AB (5400rpm) performs nearly as well, is just as quiet, and is cheaper.
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
If you're on a limited budget (as most people are when putting together home data centers) I highly recommend the STEN shelving units from Ikea. These are designed for workshop shelves, but they make excellent low-end computer racks. They're available in full and half sizes, and you can expand your rack horizontally by bolting them together (which is accomplished very easily using the included hardware). They're just the right size and shape for computer equipment, and since they're made of wood, you can easily screw things into the posts - such as power strips, small hubs, etc.
I've got a setup like this in my basement and it's very nice -- attractive and functional.
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I am not a lawyer. Do not take my words as legal advice. If you need legal advice, consult an attorney.
the net heat change by sticking a freezer in a server room is zero ( 0 )! And it'll be just as hot as it was before.
The way I read it was that the servers go inside the freezer. Simply a variation on the machines which chill the processor.
However it seems an over complicated way of doing what a fan or even just convection through appropriately located vents would do...
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
Just keep the server room door open.
I use Leviton 24"x14" metal wallmount panels for the wiring headend and brought all the telco and ethernet (both on Cat5e, natch.) into one, and the COAX for terrestrial and satellite TV into the other. That cleans up the wiring a lot.
Now to the relevance of this to the need for a server room: once you've got most of the wiring squirled away, what's left that you need fancy racks, with multiple servers that will be serious heat daemons? Are you really going to stuff a beowolf in there?
My guess is that you'll have one server for incoming email, and if you use an appropriate router/firewall, you can have it on the inside of your firewall, serving double duty for NIS, NTP, news caching, DNS caching, and all those other services that you want to distribute and perhaps connect to externally (i.e. NTP).
You can use the same or another server for local data/media storage for distribution through the house. Add a UPS and your done. This is what I plan. My only mistake was not wiring an home run to the headend in the same room as the headend.
The only way I can see you needing more servers there is if you want to set up a compute farm. I'd be half-tempted to either (a) consider a different location for a server-farm co-located with the headend, or (b) use another room/closet.
You could've hired me.
If I was moving into a brand new house, and was looking to build a server farm properly, I'd be ready - this is one of my favourite "What would you do if you won the Lottery?" answers, and I've spent a lot of time planning it.
After looking at the server farm in work I figured the first thing to decide is "What the heck is all that stuff going to sound like in my house? It's pretty noisy at work, and the walls are made of breeze block and concrete. I can hear a motor hum through the wall when there's no other noise. In my house, after about 10:30pm there's no noise at all, it's silent. If I leave my desktop PC on overnight you can hear it.
I'd certainly soundproof the walls, and if money was no object, I'd add insulation to keep the heat out. I'd then look at some kind of system to pull dust and fibles out of the air before they reached the equipment. We have an extraction system with filters that are regularly cleaned. Houses get pretty dusty, with the resultant build up all adding to the build up of heat.
I reckon you'd want to sort all that before you started with the actual ecuipment.
Now wash your hands.
For a family network, I could see needing a router, maybe a file server, and maybe a game server or two, but with the exception of the game servers, none of these have to be all that fast? What sort of network are you needing, that's you'll need an actual server room and face serious cooling issues?
I'm the stranger...posting to
I guess, if I did feel some perverse need for a server room, this is how I'd do it:
Buy a used Lego Mindstorms set.
Build a temerature sensor for the set. (Basically, just buy a thermistor from radioshack and hook it to a Lego sensor wire - it works like a light sensor.
Build a lego robot that can open the window a crack when the temp. sensor detects a temp above a certain limit. Voila. Plus, this way you get the geek-out factor.
I'm the stranger...posting to
My potential server room will be (If my mother agrees, of course)
Welcome to Slashdot.
Sigh.
--saint
Hello,
I have a small "server room" in my house, which includes 2 servers, 1 router and the cable modem.
The heat isn't really much of an issue..just get a few good fans in the servers and you're set. I have 2 fans in each of mine. The room isn't that hot at all.
All the wiring then goes out the ceiling, through the attic and then I dropped down 3 jacks to each room to plug up to the network.
internal DNS, mail/web, firewall box, another web server, RAID array... some of the machines are colocated for friends (I have a 1.1mbit SDSL line)... a lot of it is for learning stuff. :-)
HP Netra on the right, actually. DLT drive. Home-brew PCs...
Also on the left are 2 Power Mac 6100/xx class machines. They're the external DNS servers, running QuickDNS. Haven't had a single hiccup with them, despite the fact that they're basically being slashdotted daily. One of the machines that isn't visable in the photo is a box hosting a web counter that has over 15,000 users (http://www.darkcounter.com)
I think that Mike Harris hates the world and wants to screw everyone over as much as possible in retaliation. Or maybe he's just an idiot. I dunno.