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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.
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.
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.
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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.
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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?
Mice were so much of a problem, eating cables, leaving a mess on the table, etc, that I switched all of mine out for trackballs and tablets.
You never know...
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.