Slashdot Mirror
Running a Server at Freezing Temperatures?
mw13068 asks: "As a part of a backup solution, I'm thinking of running a backup server in my unheated, unattached garage. I live in central New York State, and the temperatures very often drop below zero degrees Celsius. The computer is a Pentium III Celeron running at 733MHz. Has anyone else tried this sort of thing? If you have, please share your experiences."
The computer is a Pentium III Celeron running at 733MHz.
I'd be less concerned about what type and speed the CPU is, and more concerned about a hard drive seizing up.
Make sure your case is hardened. Every little critter, including mice, will want to live in the warm case. We had a computer in an astronomical observatory dome and mice built their nest on the CPU. The acid in urine from the mice destroyed the motherboard.
The electronic should be ok, but you may run into problems with power supplies, cpu fans and disks. The lubricants on bearings change viscosities and may gum up or stop working right.
I'd be more worried about dust and dirt... video chips and cpus are always warm, and dust will be caked on the chips and cause them to overheat.
I used to work at a company that ran state park reservation systems. Sometimes I'd see machines that came from the field where they were kept in park ranger booths and were absolutely filthy. I believe the PC repair staff would end up cleaning each PC out and replacing hard disks annually.
So IMHO, I wouldn't keep backups outdoors.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
Look up the specs on all the hardware. Most have an operating temps guideline. If your within it you should be alright.
It seems like every car repair garage I go to has a shop computer for looking up parts etc.
They almost always are in the main garage, and aren't heated at night. They seem to work fine.
You will have mice and other animals trying to live in it, and using the bathroom in it. A guy that worked at a lumberyard brought a PC in for us to upgrade, and the first thing we found when we opened the case was mouse turds.
I ran a couple of dual PIII 450's in my garage in Minnesota last winter with no problem. I didn't have any room in my small apartment for them so I put them in the garage and used a couple of Linksys WAP11's in bridge mode to get them talking to my cable modem in my apartment. The average temp in the garage was about 5 degrees above zero last winter.
The one thing you need to watch out for though is static. When it gets cold and dry, you don't want to be ripping open your machines in the garage. My machines stayed up from October through last June without any problems.
1. It sounds like the backup is for a server in the same house --
which isn't much of a backup, if your concern is environmental factors (power failure, fire, flood, theft, etc.).
And re power failure, a commercial location might get more responsive service when ice takes down a power line.
2. For virtually all hardware, there's a published spec of acceptable temperatures. You should check for your equipment.
Also, beware of humidity: any sudden introduction of moisture (e.g.,
-- from opening an attached kitchen entrance while cooking pasta,
-- or moisture from an engine exhaust or a garage-located frost-free freezer,
-- or a sudden rain when the weather goes above freezing faster than your equipment thaws)
could cause condensation on your equipment.
I wouldn't worry too much about it being too cold. if you have a pusher fan, take that out. puller fans (that exhaust air, instead of pulling it in) will have the temp of the air inside the case, rather than the temp of the outside air. lubricants become more viscous with colder temps, so you want you fan to breathe the warmer air from inside the case.
you probably want to make it a smaller fan also, you don't want too much cold air going through. cold is good for CPUs but too much cold breaks solder joints.
if you can control your fan thermostatically i would recommend that. having computer parts get hot, then cold, then hot, then cold, then hot, then cold, due to day/night cycles KILLS solder joints quick. condensation is also a concern with widely varying temperatures. condensation is bad, of course.
as someone else said, rodent-proof the case and check it for infestation often. mice will chew right through sheet metal when they need to. Try mounting it on a wall somehow so rodents can't get to it.
i'm not worried about the below zero C temps, i'm worried about temperature fluctuation. using a smaller than OEM fan will keep what warm air there is inside the case there a little longer, and should keep the insides of the case above 0C constantly.
Maybe to combat the humidity, ask your friends and family to save those little dessicant packs (easy to identify: says "Do not eat, silica gel") they get in shoe boxes, sometimes clothing pockets, leather bags, computer cases, laptop cases, etc. this Christmas. If you have a large enough hoard, you can put them in the case to soak up the moisture, if it builds up in there.
Linux at home
At lower temperatures electrical wires have less resistance and it could do some damage (theoretically of course) to some electronic components.
Bullshit. Wire resistance in an electronic component should be negligible. The resistance change caused by temperature is just about impossible to detect without very sensitive instruments.
In general, electronics do not care about temperature much. Most chips, for instance, are rated from -40 to +70 degrees C. It's the mechanical stuff (hard drives and, to a lesser extent, fans) that you have to worry about. The only electrical problems that could occur would be related to condensation.
Yes, mice will chew through all exposed cables, especially if you put peanut butter on them.
What this will do is create a "bubble" of warm air inside the box that is vented when the fan is running and stable when it is off. This will keep your box temperature roughly even. If you are concerned about cold-starting hard disks after a period of off-time, make sure you have a power supply which remains off after a power loss and add a 100 W light bulb inside the box. When you want to power the system back on, switch the bulb on and leave it for an hour or two before you hit the power button, then turn the bulb off again. Do not bring cold hardware into a warm, humid house to warm up - you will get condensation.
As long as you have the bottom of the box screened against critters and otherwise isolated, you probably won't have to worry about static or other environmental nastiness.
Sustainability and energy independence essay
Tell your PC to never turn off hard disks, never turn off fans. (might freeze if they stop, and not start again). Take the floppy out of the machine, and replace the hole in the front with a blank panel. It might be a good idea to do that with the CD/DVD drives as well. Make sure that the back of the case is all sealed up, (ie, no open holes for old PCI devices you no longer have). Lastly, Don't put anything over or close to it. Your going to need it to be able to suck in air, and evacuate the air with the fans. you do not want to be recycling the air (like you would if it was under a blanket) as it can increase the moisture of the air.
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
The temperatures in NY don't get low enough for you to worry about anything but condensation, as previous posters mentioned. When I was in the Air Force, the computers we used to troubleshoot avionics loved the cold. The shop could not get above 70F or we would start seeing problems. A buddy of mine went to Iceland and they opened all the doors to the shop one day in winter and got the shop to around -10F. He said the computers never ran better. You would have to get the computer pretty damn cold before you started seeing failures. We're talking the kind of cold that the cpu can't even think about warming up.
Condensation, bugs, and critters are your only concerns.
There have quite a few suggestions on how to keep the computer warm by wrapping it, using a light bulb, etc. Another option is to just install a heater. We added a gas heater to our garage. It is a Modine Hot Dawg unit that hangs from the rafters. You could set it at a minimum setting to just keep the chill off things. Or, you could set the thermostat a bit higher and use the garage for something other than just storage, like a workshop. Of course, then you get into other issue with the computer like sawdust or dirt.
If you want to heat just the computer, there are some other options like a Heated kennel pad to set the computer on or even some heat tape like that used to keep pipes from freezing. Either of these type of things would probably transfer enough warmth through a metal case to keep the inside temperature above freezing. One advantage to the heat tape is that you could probably coil it inside the computer and leave the thermostat outside. This would keep it warm enough when it is cold, but not get too hot when the temps rise.
A garage floor is a great tempurature moderator in the summer, but it can really pull the heat from something when the temps drop outside. Uninsulated walls have a similar problem. Make sure you isolate/insulate from both as much as possible.
I live in Denmark the temperature often drops below below zero degrees Celsius. I have had three Pentium servers running in my parents garage for about three and a half years now. I have had no problems with them that was related to the cold. Actually the only hardware that has been changed in the three and a half years is a new disk on one of the servers, a new cpu-fan on another. I think this is just normal for a PC running in three years.
All three of the servers have experienced uptimes on more than a year.
thomasdamgaard.dk.
I just read through the comments at my usual mod level of 3. Every comment I read implied some need to keep the server warm. My own experience says that cold is not a problem. Heat is a problem, even in cold weather. Putting a computer in an insulated box is, in my opinion, a rather time-consuming way to destroy it.
So I decided to read all the comments. Lo and behold, the let it stay cold comments were there, but weren't being modded up. I'd take serious the overclocking suggestion; just generate a little more internal heat if you're worried about the cold.
Note to moderators: Don't jump on bandwagons. The "cold" commentators in this case were at least as "informative" and "insightful" as the "warm" commentators.
Years ago, a phone company in Canada did something that you might use. They had outdoor equipment which was cooled with a heat pipe. The fluid in the heat pipe was water. If things got too cold, the water froze and the heat pipe quit working. Thus, the equipment wouldn't get too cold. When it warmed up again, the heat pipe started working again and kept the equipment from getting too hot.
... As air cools, it can carry less moisture. The moisture drops out as condensation. If you have a surface that is colder than the air then the water tends to condense on it. If your computer is at all warmer than the air around it then you have zero worries about condensation.
Heat pipes are really easy to build. A piece of copper pipe with a cap at either end works well. Put one cap on. Put a bit of water in and get it boiling. This will drive most of the air out. Then solder the cap on the other end. As the water cools, you will get a reasonable vaccuum. Clamp some aluminum heat sinks on either end. You're done. A guy I used to know built a large heat pipe and left it lying under a tree. The sun shone on the lower end, heated up the working fluid which transferred heat to the shaded end which melted the solder and allowed the cap to blow off! These things are really good at transferring heat.
As for all this business about condensation
Monitoring the computer's temperature is probably a good idea. Mother boards I have bought recently work with a front panel that gives a readout of cpu temperature etc. I haven't done it but perhaps someone can suggest a way that you can query the computer's temperature and find out how happy it working in its sealed case.
There's lots and lots of electronics that runs permanently outside. Most of the problems have already been solved for you.
ps. Don't make the case of wood. Rodents can and will easily gnaw through.