Mapping Hacks

…We just have all kinds of people.

Clearly that is advice to live by. I wanted a new server to throw
into our 1/4 rack down at Hurricane Electric. I mean, Schuyler has
a machine in the rack, and he and I jointly have a machine in the
rack, but all those beautiful “U’s” were sitting empty, forlorn,
waiting for a machine from me!

I got a pretty cool 1U case off of EbAy for $46.97. As near as I can
tell it is a brand new case. And it included a power supply, and the
PCI 90 degree adapter. Screaming deal.

Of course, for it to be a Testing Range Production there need
to be some arbitary number of freaky weird things that have to
be done.

First weird thing was that the back cutouts were just a little off
from my mother board. But the Dremel tool made reasonably quick
work of those. I did shatter three dremel cut off wheels in the
process, but that is the price of progress.

Next the motherboard I had from my friend Nate had a full sized
heat sink and fan. Hmmm. That is not going to fit in the 1U
case. A little time with the metal cutting band saw and it seems
that I’ve taken care of that problem.

Next is the question of drives. Since Schuyler had an emergency
that required the use of my new 300 gb drive I installed Fedora
Core 3 on an old 6 gb drive. I had a 250 gb SATA drive, and
an Adaptec ASH-1205 SATA Connect Serial ATA Card. I figured it
wouldn’t hurt to try, so I installed the mess and after a quick
fdisk and mkfs I amazingly was able to mount the drive.

Fedora Core 3 recognized the Adaptec ASH-1205 and automatically
loaded the sata modules. I was happy. I don’t know if that
would work for the boot partition, but I’m happy right now.

A side benefit is that this system has an older BIOS, and
didn’t actually appear to recognize the full 300 gb of the other
drive. I assume that since the sata modules live in user space
that the BIOS loses the power to vex in this case.

The final (knock wood!) indignity was that the case was designed
for a single hard drive. It doesn’t even have cut outs on the
front panel for a floppy or CD-just blank steel.

(if you look closely at that picture you can read this text being edited. If
I were clever I would call this ‘Computer in the process of being documented’
and it would be conceptual art, and sort of clever. If only I were clever
and could capitalize on these little syncronicities. Though, since I
intentionally planned the photograph to include that text it isn’t strictly
’syncronicity’ but rather ’staged’ which is a word that here means not
random.)

Dilemna. I managed to solve the dilemna with a bit of nearly
precision metal fabrication. You can tell a geek’s operating
system from the shape of the hard drive sled used in their
server…

Screws and stuff: case and hard drive screws appear to be (mostly?)
6/32. This means size 6, and 32 threads per inch.
This is interesting because it turns out that this means if you use
a certain size drill bit you can reliably make holes that match your
screws, and if you use a slightly smaller bit, and a 6/32 tap, you
can make threads that these screws will happily grip.

And if you can tap threads you have far more options as to where
you can install things, and even, dare I say, what is possible to
treat as a computer case…(more to follow).

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