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Casemodding Enterprise Hardware
Anonymous Coward writes "Think your tower case with led fans, a cold cathode and a window is cool? See what this guy did to two Sun Enterprise 15Ks -- a casemod on $1.3 million dollars of hardware! Will mainframes start shipping with light and window options now?"
adding fancy neon tubes to anything makes it faster.
A. Rightmann
now i have this urge to mod out the old UNIVAC that I have out back in the garage
Geez, I wouldn't have thought an E15k could get slashdotted so quickly.
I won't be investing 1.3mil in Sun 15ks if they can't survive Slashdot! For that kind of money, I expect it to survive!
He can watch his machines get slashdotted from the inside now.
Now he's got a curious, glowing white light where his CPU was. /.ed to hell and back a few times, it seems.
This guy gets the Too Much Time On His Hands Award of the Week. What's his encore gonna be, a racing stripe on all the Cat-5 cable in the place?
~Philly
Damn fine idea, It will look good on ours, especially since they have been dimming the lights in the computer room at night.
Now to convince the boss....
Good job, now they look like $1.3m soda machines. He might impress me if he modded them to actually dispense soft drinks on demand!
There's a reason you won't be deciding on major equipment purchases any time soon.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
Carousel is a lie!
Gee whiz guys, it's not really a mod until you install a fishtank inside $1.3 million in hardware...
Now THAT would be impressive...
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
Hydraulics?
Creationists are a lot like zombies. Slow, but powerful and numerous. And they all want to eat our brains.
"They look like *vending machines*."
Yes, she can verbalise astericks.
-- Proud descendant of semi-nomadic cattle-herders.
Damn, you finally caught me. For years, Slashdotters have wondered who Anonymous Coward is. I always covered my tracks and made sure that I could never be traced. But on this fateful day in October 2002, I am finally revealed. :(
> Dear Boss,
> You've been wondering what I've been doing for
> the last two weeks. Go check out the server room
> and prepare to be impressed.
That's beautiful.
You're fired.
The Boss
Yeah, imagine the options!
"Ok, sir, I hear you're ordering our 2-million-dollar FibreChannel storage server. Would you like that in red, mint green, or silver, sir?"
>How can this company be doing well enough to afford this gear, yet be dumb enough to let their people "case mod" the E15K's?
Easy: It's gonna look GREAT on the cover of the annual report.
rj
Funny this should come up, but just the other day my friend and I were discussing how we could trick the average person into believing we had a supercomputer. It went like this:
1) Take 4 server cases.
2) Weld together.
3) Liberally apply blinking lights, external fans, and colored cabling.
4) Set up a 286 in one of the cases.
5) Write a Basic program to display random 1's and 0's.
The sad thing is, if I invited almost anyone I know over and said "I'm calculating Pi on my supercomputer here", they would all believe it.
It just needs a couple of spinning tape reels, randomly changing directions.
True, it's not like he took a hacksaw to the case and put a few windows in *shudders* Still, pretty ballsy... imagine how you might have gone about it
- You go up to your boss and ask: "Can I stick some of these lights in those new servers?". Boss replies by smacking your head with a 2x4.
- You stick the lights in and your boss catches you doing it. "What the #*%^$ are you doing to these!?!?". Again, the 2x4 is utilised
- The boss walks in after you finished and sees a green glow coming from a previously dark cabinet, and calls Sun support in a panic. For making him look the fool, he'll take his 2x4 and make use of it in creative ways that you will not enjoy.
Plenty of scope here for trouble. And if you have a clueless boss, and God forbid something goes wrong with the machines, he and Sun both will blame your blinkenlights...
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...