mdlbear | Hacking on... (Reply)

Finally got a "case" built for my fanless X-terminal, based on this one. Basically it's just two slabs of plastic: solid black on the bottom and translucent grey on top so you can see all the blinkenlights. Pretty cool-looking, especially when stood on edge, and of course completely silent. I could listen to it all day. I stupidly drilled the first batch of holes wrong, because I was using a piece of foam (one that came as padding under the MB) as a template. Dumb bear. The second time around I used the board itself. Plastic and 1/8" drillbit from Tap Plastics on the way to work yesterday; the plastic came straight out of their scrap bin.

The boards for my new gateway arrived yesterday. I got the daughterboard with three 10/100/1000 ethernet ports (not that I need that kind of bandwidth yet). It's in my Morex Venus case for the moment, but it's likely to end up in a custom rackmount. The main reason for doing this is to reduce power consumption and noise in the server closet; the current gateway is a 500MHz K6, and there's just no way to find quiet CPU fans for Socket 7 anymore. (Quiet 40mm fans exist; there just doesn't seem to be anyplace around here that sells them.)