Something a Little Different

[kahm]

Project: SALD mkI

For my first worklog, I decided to do Something a Little Different. It isn't focused on any one computer, but on my workstation in general. My workstation is a little more elaborate than normal, with some custom furniture, and a wide variety of equipment and computers. There are even a few minor computer mods that I've done over the years but never bothered to document.

Now, I've been neglecting the upkeep of my setup for a while now, and it has become unmanageable from a wiring perspective. On top of that, equipment attrition and part swapping has left me with a single hooked up computer and monitor, which is clearly unacceptable. Therefore, the first stage in my grand idea is to rewire the whole thing. I need to make sure it's neat, modular, and maintainable, as well as getting all my machines back online.

As you can see, I've got my work cut out for me. There are seven computers, three monitors and switchboxes, three printers, two scanners, a home theatre receiver, and 52 network ports involved in the basic workstation, not including the equipment on the 28u enclosed rack at the end.

First things first. Let's get some of the crap out of the way.

Here's the wiring mess that I started with.

So let's strip it all out.

That leaves one with a lot of free cables laying around.

 

[l0cke]

go outside much?

/subscribed

 

[rogue_jedi]

looks like fun. wiring sucks... and i just have two computers on my desk here. well, next to it. the monitors are on it, and one keyboard/mouse. i use the other set on my lap

 

[aaronlidman]

cool, something different indeed. Mind me asking what you use all these PCs for?

 

[JOKER_JOKER]

Do you really need 3 printers and 2 scanners? Couldn't you just keep the best one of each?

 

[kahm]

The first stop on the road to recovery is to get the wiring for the monitors worked out.

These are the eyes of the beast. Without them, none of this setup would be possible.

Unfortunately, they've always been a royal pain to deal with. Bulky cabling makes them awkward, and tends to disconnect frequently. They're also big enough that they don't fit well on the desktop while being both simultaneously accessible and out of my way. So what's a fellow to do with them.

Maybe? The one in the back will be a pain.

Ah ha! Much better.

My primary concern is for the length of the wiring. it has to reach the far right of the desk as well as the far left of my shelving.

Turns out the cables are 6ft long. That should hopefully be enough.

I built the "hutch" over the antique oak desk out of 3/4 inch plywood and 2x4s. It's plenty strong, with ample space to mount stuff on. You can see the center speaker off my home theatre receiver mounted at the top, rear, above my centre LCD.

But how does one get the KVM's stuck up there? They don't have any sort of mounting bracket.

Enter the right tool for the job - flexible strapping meant for plumbing.

First I cut and shape a strap to fit the KVM snugly - it needs to be able to stay anchored with pounds of cable hanging off of it, as well as with my jabbing at the buttones every once in a while. I've also bent the ends over - they're pretty sharp when they get cut off.

Et Voila! Unfortunately, the first mounting attempt may have resulted in the #4 button on one of the purple KVMs to break. I'll have to solder a replacement in later. For now I'll be using a metal-cased Dlink KVM on the desk for my secondary monitor. The tertiary monitor is run of a 2-way KVM and doesn't have any keyboard connected - just video. That's the one on the side at the bottom.

Here's the cables at the back of the top KVM.

 

[kahm]

go outside much?

I've collected the equipment and workstation bits over several years. I'm a computer contractor, among other things, and the setup does get a lot of exercise. I'm writing up the worklog now because I'm waiting for a kernel compile for a project that I'm working on for the UofA.

I'm also a bit of a collector (Unresized pics warning!)
http://www3.telus.net/~ranko/themobilecorps.JPG
http://www3.telus.net/~ranko/z-work-area.JPG
http://www3.telus.net/~ranko/pdaarmy.JPG

That being said, I've got far too many interests for my own good, and I'm hardly using it for anything fun these days

cool, something different indeed. Mind me asking what you use all these PCs for?

Game playing, programming, watching TV, drawing, networking, research, and other projects. Not necessarily in that order I'll be a little more specific later on.

Do you really need 3 printers and 2 scanners? Couldn't you just keep the best one of each?

Sadly enough, I actually do. If I'd ever spent money on them I could probably get one that did everything. As it sits, I've got an old Raven laser printer for low-quality, high volume prints like hard copies of documentation, an Okidata LED printer for high quality low-volume stuff like resumes or letters, and an HP deskjet for my color stuff. The Raven was free, the Okidata was nearly so, and the HP actually cost me a bit.

As for the scanners, I've got a USB HP Scanjet that I do most of my scanning on. The other one is an old SCSI Scanmaker E3 that I keep around because it has a 14" scanbed instead of an 11". Being SCSI, and only 300DPI it is pain to start up, but the software kicks HP's butt for doing multiple scans in a row.

 

[kahm]

Now that the monitors are done, the next step is to deal with the equipment on the top of the hutch, which is primarily three of my computers and the RCA Home Theatre Receiver.

In this before shot, the receiver is in the centre, with the "twins" to the left and a black case to the right.

The twins are in fact, fraternal. Lian-Li PC-70s have gone through a few revisions, and I bought my first one years ago, and my second one just a few days ago. The old one is the one on the left, the new one on the right. There are minor differences in the bezel and controls, as well as the fan filters behind the faceplate. The old one came with red and green LEDs, which I've replaced with blue. (Remember - this was four years ago now Blue was still cool back then.) The new design comes stock with a blue power LED, but a red HD led. These are *big* cases - 8" wide, 23" tall, and 23" deep!

You can see the rear of the twins here, as well. Notice the wire grills on the old one (closet to the camera) - That was the first thing I did when I got my $400 case home - take a dremel too it. The new one has the stock, built in grills still. Notice the difference in the pattern of holes beside the PCI slots, as well. I think you'd have to have been pretty desperate for cooling to use those 40mm fan mounts that the old one has.

The home theatre unit was cheap, as I got it at a refurbished place, and it included the 5 speakers and sub. Not only does it sound better than most computer speaker sets of a similar price, it has seven analog and two digital sound inputs that let me easily switch the speakers between the different computers. However, I've always had a problem with getting the cables to reach all the way from the centre of the desk to the far end of the shelves. Since I'm rewiring everything anyway, and the shelf that goes over it is seperate from the hutch, I'm moving it all the way to the far left of the desk. The twins go in the middle, with the black case pretty much staying put.

Once I swapped things around I started wiring in the speaker cables for the receiver. The centre speaker mounted underneath the hutch at the top, where it peeks over my LCD. The two front channels are attached to the front legs of the hutch, and the rear speakers sit on my workbench behind the computer desk.

Here I've got the audio and video cables wired up to the top 3 computers. The older "twin" only has one of it's three video connectors attached, as the cables for the other two switchboxes aren't there yet.

The desk doesn't actually stay that far away from the back wall. I've put teflon sliders on the legs of both the desk and the red shelves. One person can easily slide both of them in and out for access, even loaded to the gills with equipment. Before I upgraded to LCDs, I had 2 19inch monitors, a 17", and a 15" on the desk and it didn't matter - it still moved very easily.

 

[kahm]

Next up is the networking.

My ADSL modem, dlink wireless router, 16-port 10/100 switch, 8-port gigabit switch, and 24 port mananged Intel 10/100 switch.

The majority of my network is concentrated at my workstation. I've also got drops run to the workbench behind me for working on computers, to my writing desk in the next room, and my living room. Because I have IPTV (Television over the Internet, supplied by the phone company) I have to have the set-top boxes outside the firewall. The living room drop has my X-box and my home theatre computer, which need to be inside the firewall. Unfortunately, I only have a single run of Cat5 going to the living room, and my wireless setup is only 802.11b. This forces me to use the noisy Intel switch so that I can use VLANs - that lets me put them all on the same wire, but have the computer inside the firewall and the TV box outside the firewall. I'd much rather dispense with the Intel and use my silent 16 port switch, though.

Instead, the 16 port is retired and I'm using just the Intel, the gigabit, and the router. The Intel is split so that it works as an 8 port switch for "outside", and 16 ports "Inside".

The power cords are all strapped up at the top, out of my way.

Here's the wiring for just my network - no computers are hooked up yet.

Here's the shot from behind now that I've got networking and video hooked up to all the machines. Not quite as pretty as before, but the wire density has to be high to support everything.

And it just gets worse when I plug everything into power. It's a million times better than when I started, even if it doesn't really look that way.

 

[kahm]

So, that's done for now. The 800x600 pics link to full size 5 megabit .jpgs off my camera.

Overview:


The Desktop, including my vinyl-dyed keyboard, cue cat, and PalmV, which I use to control WinAmp.


The Hutch, right hand side.


The Hutch, left hand side, and networking.


The Shelves.


Encore shot. The strange looking thing on the left side of the desk is my digital picture frame that I made out of an old laptop. It runs a slideshow off the network from one of the other machines.

 

[kahm]

Special SALD bonus Post - the Mods and the Hardware

The "Twin" Towers, Hydra and Hades. They both have MSI K7-D Master dual athlon motherboards, Intel 66mhz Gigabit NICs, and Enermax 550watt power supplies.
- "Hydra", on the left, is so named because it has dual Athlon 2100+ and is connected to all 3 LCDs. (The hydra being a multi-headed monster guarding one of the gates to the Greek underworld.)
- "Hades", on the right, is the keeper of the underworld - in this case ~700gigabytes of data. It's my file server, with a single Athlon 2400+. They both run Kubuntu Linux.

Hydra has ~400gb of hard drive space with 2gb of ram, and Hades has 1gb. They both hook up to the Gigabit switch.

This shiny black machine started life as an incredibly cheap beige case. It was my first, and thus far only, attempt at painting a case. The bezel and DVD-ROM were both done in black vinyl dye. The system is named "Zeus", and houses a P4-3ghz system running MacOSX 10.4.3 for Intel. (So named because Zeus was a newcomer young god who came in and deposed the older Titans and took over the world. Look out Microsoft!)

This computer is called Cerberus, the great 3-headed dog that is another guardian of the underworld. Hydra, running linux, is my main workstation, and Cerebus, running Windows XP is my secondary. It also hooks up to all three LCDs, but only has a single Barton 2500+ processor (Albeit one clocked at 2.2ghz, for a smoking 3200+ rating), and 1gb of ram.

I had actually bought this case as a counterpart for the one I have Zeus in. Where Zeus's case was laboriously wet sanded, painted and dyed, I wanted to go as far as possible the other way with a cheezy off the shelf black case. This one was cheap, had blue light tubes on the front, and a glowy blue fan on the side, so it, along with a factory black bezel on the DVD-Burner, fit the bill perfectly. Unfortunately, the fans were quite annoyingly loud. Ironically, since I wanted to keep the factory-cheeze intact, I had to get creative making a stealth fanbus for it.

I don't think I've ever seen anyone take quite this path for a fanbus before. Those are cupboard latches that magnetically hold the faceplate (to which I've mounted a metal plate), in place. Push on the faceplate and it pops out half an inch for easy removal. They're attached to a gutted CD-ROM frame for mounting. The fanbus uses 3 way swtiches to select off, 12 volt or 9 volt operation. I used 2 heatsinked 7809 voltage regulators for the 9-volt power.

This next machine is my "Fire-breathing monster", accordingly called "Prometheus" after the Titan that stole fire from the gods and gave it to mankind. (If I'd been doing Nordic legend instead of Greek, I'd have called it Surtr, king of the fire giants and lord of Muspel, the land of fire.) It is my most recent computer, with dual eVga 7800GT, 2gb of ram, and an Athlon X2 3800+. Not *very* fire-breathing, but it sure seemed so after my last game machine, which had a 6600GT. As soon as I find a good deal on some good ram, I'll be OCing this thing as far as I can get on Air. It's my "Wintendo", only meant for playing games, so I can afford to push it a bit. The only mods on the box consist of a blue cathode I had laying around (because the case is silver/blue with a factory window, and hey, it's a game computer. Cheeze is expected ), and the re-mounting of the dials for two speed controlled Silverstone 80mm fans.

This last computer is my drive sink. It holds all my leftover IDE hard drives that still have data that I need to (eventually) recover. The case is an old server case with dual-redundant hard drives and 12 5.25" bays. As part of SALD mkII, I'll be changing this machine over to the 16 bay case, with dual-dual redundant powersupplies. The old case will be earmaked for a future SALD chapter, which will acutally be something *really* different The machine runs Kubuntu, has 8 ide hard drives ranging from 40gb to 120gb, and is powered by Dual-P3 1ghz processors, and 1gb of CAS2 PC-133 ram. (Wahoo! Now we're playing with power! ) Its name is Atropos, one of the three Fates, so called because I have two more dual P3 platforms, which will be named Lachesis and Clotho. On top of it is one of my set-top boxes for my IPTV from Telus.

This next machine is one of my more interesting mods. I had an old Toshiba laptop (Pentium 200, 32mb ram) that I got for free because it had no battery, the keyboard didn't work, and the hard drive died. I stripped it out and mounted the motherboard between 2 layers of 1/4" MDF, and the screen on the front behind 1/8" Lexan. It acts as my digital picture frame, running image slideshows off the network. It currently exists as a "proof of concept" machine, running Win98 and remotely controlled by Radmin. When I get some free time I'm going to convert it to some flavour of linux running off of a flash card so that its solid state. The legs were aluminum stock that I bent in place. The bolts go straight through the whole thing to hold it together, the pieces seperated by spacers made of nylon tube. No, it doesn't have a Greek name. It's just the "DPF"

Last on the list is this little baby - which will be part of my SALD mkII. It's a 28u, fully enclosed rack. (I've taken off the front and back doors for the time being. The front door was steel framed with clear plexi). It's government surplus, which I got for $10. It currently only contains decomissioned hardware - nothing that I'm currently using.

My $10 included 3 fully populated 5U cases, which made it weight about a bazillion pounds. Populated with what, you ask? Each had eight P-200MMX blades, and dual 400 watt powersupplies. Each pair of cases was rated over 15 amp power draw, meaning that the full rack required a pair of dedicated 20-amp circuits. The setup, when new, probably ran close to $50,000. Amazing what $10 will get you these days. I've kept one case intact, outfitting the P-200s with 4gb SCSI drives so I can play with some cluster computing.

The other two I modded into ATX standard cases, which will be the future homes for my remaining pair of Dual-P3s, Clotho and Lachesis. Currently one is filled with my old 160gb, Raid-5 file server, which I have yet to pull the data off of.

Well, that's it for now. I've got the other half the room to re-org, including the rack. After that I'll move to the living room where I'll being working on my home theatre setup, including Calliope, my HTPC, and a computer related mod for the entertainment centre that is more than just a little different.

 

[aaronlidman]

dude. Very very cool. Specially love that picture frame. Great job with the wiring too.

 

[Everfalling]

i love this. i love all these old computers and obscure parts and cases. i even love the mess of wires. i donno why but i've always liked old computer parts. the thought of something that used to be top of the line at one time is now collecting dust and being used for music storage is nostalgic in some way. it makes me wonder, in 10 years will we see a picture of someones messy room, look in the corner and say 'hey, isn't that an alienware case?' or 'isn't that a 7800GTX sitting on the desk collecting dust?' and what would the future of technology bring us, and what would those fantasic futuristic machines look like covered in dust and scuf marks... yeah sorry..kinda dazed out there... this should prove to be an interesting project.

 

[][nquisitor]

Yikes.. fire hazard? haha. Getting all that crap nice and organized is always a big relief.

 

[Endurance Man]

Could i ask why you have all those routers/server things in your home , what do you use it all for?

 

[apHytHiaTe]

Could i ask why you have all those routers/server things in your home , what do you use it all for?

The better question is why don't you have that kind of stuff?

It looks to me like he enjoys IT and likes to experiment with servers, routers, clustering, and all that good stuff. Maybe he has a business...

 

[kahm]

The technical term for it is "Silicon Dependency Issues".

I'm a hardware nut. I love computing hardware, and have been collecting it for years. It's easy to do - start off buying one computer and occaisionally upgrade. Don't throw anything out. Ever. People with more advanced stages of this particular syndrome also evolve the ability to collect *other* people's upgraded castoffs. Space, and sanity, rapidly become an issue.

The fact that I can make money while doing it is just an excuse.

 

[mrweasel]

Dude, seriously, you need help. Throw some of that schitt away. Who really needs 7 PDAs? I don't wanna see your electric bill

 

[Majin]

Go and buy some Plastic flexi tubing, the kind in the Auto department. Stuff the groupes of wires in that, and use twist ties for the rest. The wires can still be cleaned up more than that, you just need to tie things up.

Overall that is a very CRAZY set up. I would love to get my hands on some old server racks. Any one know where you can pick this stuff up?

 

[jeffmoss26]

wow. nice setup. lots of cool hardware.

 

[coolkishan]

SHIT!!!!! how much is ure electricity bill.. seriously!!!

But wiked stuff... i wuld luv all of that

 

[kahm]

Go and buy some Plastic flexi tubing, the kind in the Auto department. Stuff the groupes of wires in that, and use twist ties for the rest. The wires can still be cleaned up more than that, you just need to tie things up.

I change stuff around enough that tieing it up much futher will become more of a hinderance than anything else. I've already found a weakness in the new setup, and I'll be moving a lot of junk around again this weekend.

Overall that is a very CRAZY set up. I would love to get my hands on some old server racks. Any one know where you can pick this stuff up?

Surplus auctions. I've gotten some very nice goodies from University and Government auctions, as well as a liquidation auction from one of the local computer stores that went under.

 

[kahm]

SHIT!!!!! how much is ure electricity bill.. seriously!!!

But wiked stuff... i wuld luv all of that

Hibernation is my friend. The equipment spends most of its time off or in powersave. Power bills have definitely been a concern in the past.

 

[kahm]

Well, some time has passed since I finished rewiring things, and I've found a major problem with my setup.

Notice where the intake fans on the twins are - dead centre and just above my head. Extremely annoying.

I've got a different hosting solution now, so I've actually got room for a more pics now. Updates will be coming soon.