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Homebrew Rackmount Watercooling
Airspirit writes "For those of you who believe that bigger is always better and have multiple computers in your house,
this system may be a way to keep them all cool and organized. As an added bonus, it will heat a medium sized apartment all by itself!
This article at Pro/Cooling gives a step by step walkthrough describing the evolution of this five gallon monstrosity. Not only does this cover the construction of the cooling system, but the drawbacks such as algae prevention and maintenance as well."
Google Cache. Of course, no pictures....
You, dear sir, are trolling. Plenty of people need lots of power in house. Some like to do 3D artwork which requires a lot of power for rendering. Others yet work at home, serving their websites and the such, and want to keep their computers managable and neatly tucked away somewhere so that their spouce doesn't lash them for all the cables running everywhere. I'de have a rackmount system myself if I could afford such a thing.
;).
I just feel sorry for the poor guy. The heat must get unbearable when those things start churning. Maybe he should use the water cooling system to cool himself off instead
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
You are bound to have the following happen.
1.) Be marked as overrated, troll, or offtopic to a -1 karma
2.) If someone other than me does reply they will either mention the FAQ, or provide you with a link.
3.) Someone will actually "tell" you what the FAQ Says
Slashdot should cache pages to prevent the Slashdot Effect!
Sure, it's a great idea, but it has a lot of implications. For example, commercial sites rely on their banner ads to generate revenue. If I cache one of their pages, this will mess with their statistics, and mess with their banner ads. In other words, this will piss them off.
Of course, most of the time, the commercial sites that actually have income from banner ads easily withstand the Slashdot Effect. So perhaps we could draw the line at sites that don't have ads. They are, after all, much more likely to buckle under the pressure of all those unexpected hits. But what happens if I cache the site, and they update themselves? Once again, I'm transmitting data that I shouldn't be, only this time my cache is out of date!
I could try asking permission, but do you want to wait 6 hours for a cool breaking story while we wait for permission to link someone?
So the quick answer is: "Sure, caching would be neat." It would make things a lot easier when servers go down, but it's a complicated issue that would need to be thought through in great detail before being implemented.
Answered by: CmdrTaco Last Modified: 6/14/00
4.) Someone might actually answer your question ...
Basically it all boils down to slashdot doesn't care if it causes an effect similar to that of a denial of service attack. They feel that since they are linking to a public webserver that they are doing no more harm than say a search engine. The caching of a webpage would mean that they would have to invest time and technology into a caching system (which they have neither the programming experience or capabilities) and not to mention money in the hardware (gotta store the things).
It's a weird situation, slashdot publishes a story acknowledging That there are smaller servers that never intend to have the amount of traffic that they get. Just so happens that no one has actually sued slashdot yet, which happens to be the only thing the editors fear more than being fired.
So will you see a change, no, and why? Because of the above mentioned reasons and because those responsible for building slashdot are lazy and not innovative. You want innovation and caching then I would highly reccomend google. Just post in the subject line of most slashdot stories, since most of them are usually a week old, they've already been cached.
Ignore the "p2p is theft" trolls, they're just uninformed
Warm water breeds all sorts of wildlife. Use waterbed disinfectant in there (or a small amount of bleach) to keep things clean.
The trick then is that the water containment needs to be waterproof sealed, otherwise as the water evaporates, you'll have chemicals floating around in the air of your house.
Karma: Chameleon (mostly due to the fact that you come and go).
This is actually my system. I don't think Joe, the owner of Pro/Cooling (not hosted on a watercooled system, btw), had any warning that his server was about to be slashdotted. I suppose spraying your systems down with a fire extinguisher is not the best way to spend a Monday morning, but who am I to judge?
... oddly enough, she uses Windows for the "heavy lifting" and Linux because she loves the games!).
And he always said he wanted more traffic, hehe.
Anyway, the reason I have so many machines is that I do professional web design and database programming, an obscene amount of gaming, and host multiple network services. From top to bottom you have:
PC 1: Gaming, development (WinXP/Mandrake 9.1)
PC 2: Wife's office computer (WinXP/Mandrake 9.1)
PC 3: Linux network server
I host a mini-ISP out of my house for the neighborhood, so the Linux server helps keep bandwidth consumption down as well as providing other services my customers demand.
I have a KVM that allows me to swap between PCs 1 and 3, and she has her own equipment for her PC (I just leave it alone
Anyway, I better go run and hide before Joe hunts me down!
Airspirit
Check out the Google Cache of the page
Easy, one is a firewall for your internal LAN, one is a shell/web/irc/ftp/DNS/mail server for your friends and family, one is the backup mail and DNS server, one is a file server on your internal network for Samba/NFS sharing and general purpose Linux stuff, one is your desktop (not in the rack usually), one is your laptop, one is your wife's laptop, one is an old Sparc 20 you had lying around, one is an old AlphaStation 200 you had lying around, one is a P90 running Win95 used for nothing really, one is a PPro-150 box running Win98, one is a dual PPro-200 box running Linux... err, you get the idea. Add in networked printers and your wireless access point and you have a rack full of shit.
..how this works." "The white stuff requires two types of glue to form a seal. First you apply primer, rubbing the brush around until the PVC starts dissolving and looks milky (do this on both parts on all areas that will be connected), and then you apply PVC glue until the primer and glue are completely mixed (on both parts).." You don't /mix/ the primer and glue! The primer is a alchohol-based cleaning compound! If you don't wait until it dries, the joint won't bond.
".. and then you slide the parts together and hold on for dear life."
Hell yes! He mixed the glue and primer: "Pal, you're going to be holding that for a loooong time.."
Oh, and I /do/ work with Sch 40; think 200 psi pressure lines. Don't mix the primer, man. It ain't purty.
"The most looniest, zaniest, spontaneous, sporadic Impulsive thinker, compulsive drinker, addict"
"He is wise, but inexperienced. His pattern indicates two-dimensional thinking."
-Mr. Spock
I invested in rack mount cases and an enclosure a few years back, and haven't regretted it. If you have little floorspace and need several machines, racks can't be beat. They use airspace that is otherwise wasted. Mine uses a closet.
But God Allmighty, it's not cheap.
The exception is if you use a large ventilation fan to blow into an open case. (been there done that.)
I DO use my computer as a whitenoise generator at night though. I've seen people charge $100-200 for whitenoise generators, when a simple program on a PC can do the trick. Under Linux, do a search for "whitenoise". Nice small program.
Under Windows, so far the best solution I have come up with is to use Octave to generate a white noise (actually, "pink" noise, i.e. white noise that has been lowpass filtered) waveform, save it to .wav, and set Winamp to play it in an infinite loop.
Octave code to do this:
This creates white noise at a high level up to abour 2.2 kHz, and then additional noise at a much lower volume up to 4.4 kHz or so. You can adjust the cutoff frequencies (Second arguments to both fir1() functions and the ratios of volumes to your preference.Note that I generate a noise array and then dupe it three times before filtering it and then truncating it again. This prevents discontinuities in the final waveform that would present audible clicks/pops after every loop. (Similar theory to some of the tricks used to make seamless tiles in The GIMP.)
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
It was in an article on Tom's Hardware Guide. An impressive display of how Intel and AMD processors responded to loss of heatsink. AMD's processors instantly turned to toast, while P3's locked, and P4's slowed down to reduce heat output until the heat sink was put back on (a really cool and useful ability). Since then, AMD's new processors will shutdown (similar to the P3's response I think) if on a motherboard that supports the ability. I'm not talking about the little heat sensor thing most MB's have, which couldn't respond to a 300 degree increase in temperature in 2 seconds.
"No one likes working in a hamster wheel, and your shop smells of cedar shavings from here." - TaleSpinner
YES - it's called a thermocouple. There is one in every standing-pilot gas boiler, used as a flame-failure detector. The pilot flame heats the thermocouple probe, producing a current which holds in an electromagnet. This electromagnet operates a valve upstream of the other controls. If the pilot flame blows out, the thermocouple cools down, and the electromagnet releases. This blocks off the gas supply, preventing against an explosion hazard.
.....
The priming knob is a way to open the safety valve manually to get some gas to the pilot burner so you can light it in the first place.
A modern boiler uses electronic ignition, and senses the flame electronically. This is easy. Fire is a chemical reaction; in a chemical reaction there are charged particles in motion; and where there are charged particles in motion, a current can be made to flow. In practice the current is about a microamp for a small pilot flame, or several uA if the main burner is lit directly {which is now becoming more common}. Lighting a bigger burner does not, of course, require a higher-energy spark, as the activation energy of a chemical reaction is independent of the quantities of reagents present. But it does allow you to get away with even simpler plumbing {only one gas valve instead of two} and it also saves one relay on the circuit board.
I know all this from my previous employment
Coming back to thermocouples, you can make a thermocouple junction from any two dissimilar metals. They only need to be twisted together; you can cold-weld them. Soldering introduces a third metal, but doesn't make any difference to the voltage as you then have 2 junctions: metal A to solder and solder to metal B, and the First Law of Thermodynamics says that Vas + Vsb = Vab.
The problem with using thermocouples to generate electricity from a processor is simply that you need a large temperature differential for them to work well, and a processor is only reaching about 60 degrees or so with a heatsink -- it will melt at about 160 degrees, but the PTC {positive temperature coefficient} effect means it will stop working around 120 degrees, as the electrical resistance of the power and ground connections becomes too great for reliable operation.
Even if you let the processor get up to 80 degrees, this is still only 60 degrees above room temperature, and this small difference won't produce a lot of millivoltage. Of course, you can connect thermocouples in series -- such an arrangement is known as a thermopile, and has been used to power a wireless set from the flame of a paraffin lamp. You need to put a hot thermocouple junction into series with a cold junction, and so on. The catch is that you need for there to be a large temperature difference between the hot and cold ends, but the more junctions you introduce into the thermopile then the more paths there are for heat to be conducted from the one side to the other.
You could cool the cold junctions with liquid nitrogen, but you might as well just pour the N2 on the processor.
Older processors with larger feature sizes were more immune to overheating, as the PTC effect was enough to protect the chip from meltdown. I've seen old pentium MMXes run with no heatsink -- they typically last just long enough to boot Windows 95, then seize up solid, but they can survive the experience! I wouldn't trust a modern Athlon without a heatsink, though.
And, since not all of the electricity supplied into a processor is converted to heat in the processor {some of it is converted to other forms of energy and/or converted elsewhere}, then you won't get the full amount back.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!