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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?"
Two big cases stuffed with neons.
Very cool, if you have a christmas light fetish or something, otherwise just boring and stupid.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
It has had panels, full of neon lamps. You can :(
write some words using that lamps by writing an auxillary programs. It had thousands of lamps.
You may imagine you are at a starship command deck!
Image is here (old story, b/w photo...
That vendor would be Alteon Web Systems on their AceDirector series. Too bad Nortel bought them, drove the stock into the ground, and then failed to update any of their technology for years...
Go check out a mirror http://mosascii.com/sd/casemod/casemod.htm
All he did was add lights to the outsides of the cases. If that voids his warranty on his 1.3 million dollar arrays then I for one will never be buying SUN.
CRT monitors are affected more by low-frequency EMI than the RFI computers emit.
A simple test: Take the lid off of your case, and place it beside the monitor. Nothing strange happens.
Next, place an AC-operated fan, transformer-based soldering iron, or similar magnetic device next to the monitor, and watchen das blinkenrainbow.
That said, flat peices of steel (such as that which comprises your case) do very little to counteract low-frequency magnetism, while aluminum does absolutely nothing. Common steel can have some low-freuquency shielding effect if it's curved just so, but that's usually impractical. (there's other stuff, such as Mu-Metal, which is formulated with the specific goal of blocking EMI, and does work quite well. But it's expensive, and hard to find.)
I have to be careful where I put my Best FerrUPS because the large ferroresonant transformer in it will cause monitors to shake from several feet away.
Problems with computer-generated RFI generally show up with radio and television. I can't listen to an AM radio anywhere near my apartment with the PCs on, and there's a few FM stations that I can only recieve outside or in the back bedroom, away from the machines.
My neighbors must hate me for it, as I'm sure it's not much better anywhere in the building. But the 300-pound, heavy-footed woman upstairs has four kids who wake up at 5:30 AM daily, and the people directly beside me have a bad habit of listening to one-note bass lines with their lousy, one-note subwoofer, directly on the other side of the wall behind my desk.
So, I guess I care a lot less about RFI than I do about proper cooling. Thus, the top of the case is completely absent, allowing all kinds of natural, quiet convection cooling to take place.
Kid-proof tablet..
rm-r.net is a small isp. I doubt a small ISP is using 2Sunfire 15k's and a E10k. Most likely it is the isp of whoever did the case mods, at a different company. Only time will tell.
I mod down any one who says "I'm sure I will get modded down for this"
I don't know why the link for the Sun Fire 15K info goes to Nationwide Value Computer (whatever that is) instead of the official Sun site. NVC apparently has no bandwidth, but I'm sure Sun has plenty to spare.
Here's a link to the official site: http://www.sun.com/servers/highend/sunfire15k/
Pay no attention to the fool who thinks this violates a contract, until he points out the specific contract clauses that it violates. For the record, I work for Sun providing support too, and can't think of any reason I'd have a problem with this unless the machines specifically started having real problems (if we could trace the problems to the lights, it'd be "remove the lights or no service", but we'd have to prove the lights were a problem first, and I can't think of how they really would be).
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
What are you kidding?!
The power bill for lights would be beyond nothing compared to the cost of powering the 15k, not to mention the A/C to cool the damn thing.
Hi. I posted the original thread. As I posted elsewhere, I just haven't taken the time to create an account yet. Today I had to move my company's datacenter from NYC to NJ, so I've been pressed for time, as you can imagine.
The email address is correct. Email me if you care to.
Yours,
Joshua Thomas
Network Operations Engineer
PowerOne Media
Troy, NY
Now, in the old days when all of a machine's output was through blinkenlights or line printers, it was important to display more diagnostic information on the machines. Now we have consoles and logs, but maybe we don't watch those as often as we should.
I think it would be great if boxmakers could give you an option for a blinkenlights panel that told you a little more about the system's state: processor load, memory load, disk capacity would all be nice. I remember the BeBox's great dual-processor load monitor on twin strips of LEDs along either side of the front of the case. I would probably even pay an extra $100 or so for the extra lights (on a $10K server it's a pretty small incremental addition to the price). If I walked past the machine and saw it was heavily loaded when I didn't expect it to be, I could go check it out and see what was going on.
And if the unused lights just did programmable effects, that would be nice too... it would be a nice, reassuring little "Still here, just waiting for some data to chew on."
hey all
:)
seems i've been slashdotted.. (thanks)
the problem with my site is the fact that i never increased the apache server count, so you guys pegged it and it's been refusing connections all day.. sorry about that.. if i had any idea it was going to be this popular i may have bumped it up
anyhow, obviously the web site isn't running on those 15ks - if you look closely at the pictures, they're not even plugged in yet..
some answers:
1. we're not a dot-com..
2. we just took delivery of the 15k's and the adic 10k and decided something needed to be done to spruce them up..
3. it was my bosses idea, actually, he paid for it..
4. we're pretty good friends with sun, i doubt they'll have a problem with it..
5. calling this a 'casemod' is a bit of a joke, i know it's not modding anything in the true spirit of the "case modder", just velcroing lights to it.. like i'm going to take a dremel to something that costs this much - even we have limits.. so sorry for the bruised egos, folks..
6. lots of people are taking this far too seriously..
7. for the network guys - the cisco gear is maxed out, the other blades haven't arrived yet.. the one that's mostly populated will have fiber in the unused areas, the second will be a warm standby copy.. my comment of 'boring' is a dig at the network guy, as this whole thing was meant for my co-workers and close friends, not general consuption..
8. we plan on putting a camera in the adic to watch the robot..
9. these machines are incredibly dense, you can see from the picture, so really the only thing we have to work with are the doors.. even if you think it's lame, you have to admit it's pretty cool..
10. we're still debating about the colors..
thanks a lot to those of you who get it and think this is fun, since that's all it's intended to be.. it's not a folly of having too much money or a pinhead boss, it's just a bunch of unix dorks having fun before we plug the thing in..
bri..
it's the fact that apache was running with a maxthread count of 150.. being the site's owner makes you look like a huge idiot in public when you get /.ed.. ;)
for those of you playing at home: it's not EDIC - you're reading ADIC, the maker of the tape library to the left of the 15k's..
at any rate, i've upped the thread count over and over, it keeps pegging - i think the limit now is my upstream bandwidth since the load on the machine is negligable.. sorry folks!
Just FWIW, the official Sun-branded 2x4 is Part # 414-1100-01.
...
Just check next time you get an Enterprise or Sun Fire server on a pallet
--NBVB
Duh, we've all known that "The Machine That Goes PING!" is the most important machine to have around in case your suits pop in.
Linux: The world's best text-adventure game.
Here is another mirror: http://www2.shuman.org:8082/mirror/www.rm-r.net/~b ri/casemod/
:)
For now, all the sizes are there. We will see how long that lasts