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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."

14 of 213 comments (clear)

  1. Please don't even remind me... by Mensa+Babe · · Score: 5, Funny

    Please don't even remind me about homebrew rackmount watercooling... Just remember to always check if the water is not leaking anywhere before you turn it on together with $15000 equipment. This is a lesson I learned the hard way...

    --
    Karma: Positive (probably because of superiour intellect)
  2. energy consumption by jacquesm · · Score: 5, Interesting

    this makes you wonder how long it will be before information surpasses transportation as the largest consumer of energy on the planet

  3. Bring on the traditional /. jokes by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Ok, the web site is down. Bring on the traditional
    jokes! It has to do with water cooled systems. So,
    let's see...

    1. The water must be boiling! Har har har!

    2. Time for some more coolant! Har har har!

    3. The radiator must have blown a gasket! Har har har!

    4. Imagine a beowulf cluster of . . .

    5. They need to switch to a better coolant than water! har har har!

    Oy, this is sooooo predictable. Mod this down because I
    close with a traditional "slashdot sucks" comment.

  4. Algae prevention? A plecostomos??? by beacher · · Score: 5, Funny

    I'm looking at the green water on the diagram and I see the blackish smudge and I'm wondering if that's a plecostomos???
    Now I suppose someone's gotta code Perl::FishFeed to make sure the algae prevention measures are in place....
    -B

  5. Slashdotted by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Google Cache. Of course, no pictures....

  6. drawback? by grub · · Score: 5, Funny


    ..but the drawbacks such as algae prevention..
    Algae prevention is a drawback? Remind me to never eat from the submitter's refridgerator.

    --
    Trolling is a art,
  7. And it's an alarm clock too! by bobdotorg · · Score: 5, Funny

    7:17 a.m. - article posted on Slashdot.

    7:19 a.m. - water cooling system begins to be put to the test

    7:27 a.m. - Slashdeath results in a high pitched whistle caused by steam venting from piping.

    7:27:05 a.m. - Apartment dweller wakes.

    Rube Goldberg would be proud.

    --
    __ Someday, but not this morning, I'll finally learn to use the preview button.
  8. Hombrew? by Geek+Boy · · Score: 5, Funny

    Argh I saw homebrew and excitedly clicked in because I thought it was a way to keep the PC cool while brewing your own beer. Boy was I surprised.

  9. Re:Neat by a_timid_mouse · · Score: 5, Funny
    >I'd get one if for nothing else but the coolness of it.

    No pun intended, right? :-D

  10. Update::Servers Have Overheated by ellem · · Score: 5, Funny

    Apparently all 5 gallons of water evaporated due to the Slashdot effect.

    --
    This .sig is fake but accurate.
  11. Re:Wouldn't it be nice if Slashdot included a copy by SuperDuG · · Score: 5, Informative
    wouldn't it be nice if Slashdot had a temporary copy /cached web sites they linked to instead of the original? I'm sure this would greatly reduce sladotting problems.

    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
  12. Hope that coolant is kosher... by Ashen · · Score: 5, Funny

    It must be time to go to bed. I just worked all night and at first I read "Hebrew rackmount cooling." I was so confused.

  13. Article Author by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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?

    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 ... oddly enough, she uses Windows for the "heavy lifting" and Linux because she loves the games!).

    Anyway, I better go run and hide before Joe hunts me down!

    Airspirit

  14. Just the opposite for me. by Andy+Dodd · · Score: 5, Informative
    I've found that most computer noises (even HD/CPU fan whine) don't make good whitenoise for sleeping.

    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:

    noisy = rand(1,65536*2);
    noisy = noisy-mean(noisy);
    noisy = [noisy noisy noisy];
    noisy2 = rand(1,65536*2);
    noisy2 = noisy2-mean(noisy2);
    noisy2 = [noisy2 noisy2 noisy2];
    myfiltlo = fir1(512,.2);
    myfilthi = fir1(512,.4);
    lownoise = filtfilt(myfiltlo,1,noisy);
    highnoise = filtfilt(myfilthi,1,noisy);
    lownoise = lownoise + highnoise/48;
    mywave = lownoise(65536:65536+65536*2);
    mywave = mywave-mean(mywave);
    mywave = mywave/max(abs(mywave));
    mywave = mywave';
    ausave('whitenoise.wav',mywave,22050);
    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?