No Duct Tape... ...but there's yogurt.

While I haven't done any formal studies on the matter, my wild, off-the-cuff guess is that at 60% of the time involved in setting up servers out here at the treehouse is devoted to overcoming the universal requirement for awkward, bad, or just plain stupid mechanical design for computer cases. Personally, I find the whole thing at least a little bit mystifying, because, in just about every (ahem) case, even a small intrusion of rational thought and/or cursory examination of the components the enclosure was putatively designed for would have resulted in a vastly more useful design with no increase in materials or manufacturing expense.

At least half the time, even shifting an errant bracket or mounting point by as little as a quarter or eighth of an inch would have fixed a few design problems or at least made them manageable.

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Galvanized steel hanger tape, on the other hand, manages to find its way into almost every x86-based machine.

Nearly every metal insert designed to hold hard drives in a standard case appears to have been designed to limit airflow and cooling, make drive installation awkward and difficult, not quite fit enough drives, place drives just outside the reach of standard ribbon cable lengths, and finally, when hard drives are finally wedged into its protesting personal space, it turns out that the insert cannot be mounted in the case if you would also like to have memory installed in the computer.

Consequently, I often end up stripping out the built-in mounting hardware and inserts and building the internal mounting structure out of hanger tape. The airflow and cooling is better, there's a lot more freedom for where the drives can be placed (thus allowing them to be within reach of ribbon cables instead of just beyond), and I can even move the mounting location that critical eighth-inch that permits the server to have memory installed on the motherboard as well.

Usually, I have the tape running vertically when mounting drives, but on some servers where I just gave up on the whole "pc enclosure" idea and built rack-mount "modules" with the drives put together like this drive array used for video editing.

But speaking of drive arrays and cooling, those old bicycle innertubes aren't just for furniture repair and restoration any more--a short piece of an innertube works great for fitting a cooling fan into a drive mounting bracket.

It makes a decent seal and absorbs vibration. What more could you want?

To be fair, not all server hardware designs are completely stupid. By comparison, the Sun machines out here--mostly dual 300MHz Ultra 2s with 2GB of memory--don't require any modifications to get them working and to keep them humming away for years at a stretch.

However, they are what they are; you really can't go and add some extra drive bays, put in an (affordable) hardware RAID controller, or otherwise keep upgrading them so they stay at whatever more-or-less constant distance behind the state-of-the-art that your finances will allow.

But a lot of IT equipment that isn't *completely* stupid is still unnecessarily obnoxious. Like this Cisco 3745 router here. It has its share of plusses and minuses to the design, but one of the minuses is that it's way too noisy. The 3620s I've been using for the past several years and the newer 2851 I'm also testing out are far quieter--not exactly silent, but you don't hear them above the other assorted servers on the racks nearby.

The 3745, on the other hand, sounds like you mounted an early model dustbuster on your server rack and kept it running 24/7. Besides being a whole lot quieter to begin with, the 2851 also has fan speed control and it's an option you can activate on the 3620s, but apparently there's no such provision on the 3745.

If you take a quick look at the fan tray assembly, you get an idea why--this little 3u router is cooled by four of the second-noisiest 92mm fans Delta Electronics makes. Each individual fan has a rated airflow of 54 qubic feet per minute, which theoretically should mean 216 cubic feet being pumped through a half-cubic-foot box every minute. That's a lot, especially considering that the entire machine only consumes 58 watts according to the Kill-a-Watt power meter I have it plugged into...thirteen of which is used to run the fans, if they are, in fact, using their rated .28 amps at 12 volts.

So, as seems to be a continuing trend with Cisco routers out here (the 3620s having required some component-level repairs to get their fast ethernet modules running properly), out came the soldering iron and I took the existing wiring harness, clipped off the Delta fans, and spliced on four standard 3-pin fan headers (just to make sure that any speed/fan status monitoring functions were left intact).

Unfortunately, I had only two matching 92mm fans on hand, but they and the other two mismatched fans are all quiet, low-speed fans rated at around 28cfm and 0.07 amps at 12 volts, so we should be getting about half the airflow with a quarter the power consumption and 20db less noise. And since the interior connectors are all standard 3-pin style, I always have the option of replacing them with higher-output fans or, just maybe, four fans that are all the same color.

I'll probably go with some clear fans with blue LEDs. That'll give the Cisco a more up-to-date look.

Even with mismatched, low-speed fans, so far its temperature monitors have had no complaints, it feels like there's plenty of air coming through, and the airflow doesn't even feel warm--and that's on a hot day in August. But at least now it's a quieter hot day in August down here in the server's quarters.

I've grown fond of bolting a lot of the server room hardware onto relay racks; access is convenient and airflow is good. Some rack-mount hardware has the convenient option of letting you mount the rack "ears" near the center of gravity, but many don't, and that can make the relay-racks a little back-heavy.

(Oh, if you're curious, the pile of mail at the base of the racks is a batch of domain renewal notices from Verisign; at least now you know why their registration fees are so much higher than the rest of the world's: just the postage alone must run be costing them plenty.)

The news servers out here are all seated on or under a "desk" made from a concrete shower base supported on a pair of brightly-painted steel aquarium stands (don't ask me--I didn't pick the color scheme; I got 'em mixed in with a bunch of used reef tank stuff).

As usual, we can see that Nyx is leading the way in high-tech furniture design. Because of weight and shipping cost reasons, most "computer furniture" manufacturers have elected not to use the same "concrete and heavy steel tubing" materials used here, but you'll notice that now all the "high-tech" office furniture incorporates the "integral shower drain" feature so you can run cords down to the equipment below and/or channel very large coffee spills through your desk rather than off the sides.

Some of the surplus server equipment I get in is, unfortunately, so proprietary and obsolete that not even awesome powers of yogurt lids and hanger tape are capable of upgrading it. But I try not to waste exotic hardware that can still be used for some useful purpose. Here is one of the Netframe redundant processor systems that I understand used to operate the infamous first state-of-the-art (or state-of-destruction) baggage handling system for United Airlines at Denver International Airport.

While none of the Netframe machines I have are currently plugged and active, they are still cool-looking enough to use for decorative pedestals.

Sometimes you just have to accept that even the most advanced and state-of-the-art computers, sooner or later, become too obsolete to use for present-day computing tasks.

...at least until a suitable compiler and the new Linux kernel source becomes available on paper tape.

So what do you do with all the duct tape you have left over because you didn't use it on the servers? Here's one use--in this case, a whole lot of it was used to build a custom clothing dummy so costumes could be tailored to fit me without my actually being there. You can see how that could be a big timesaver.

But, just as a suggestion, if you decide to do this, be sure to wear long underwear or something similar *underneath* the duct tape. Oh, and breathe in before wrapping your chest. It'll be more pleasant than trying to breathe in afterwards.