I finally found one of the other photos I've been looking for! I used to work for a webhosting company, and one of the perks was that we could colocate a personal server at the datacentre. As long as we didn't cause any trouble, we could use as much bandwidth as we want.
This might not sound like a bit deal, but this was back in the pre-NBN days when most people only had an ADSL2+ connection at home. The Telstra exchange with the DSLAM was just up the road, so our speeds were as good as you could reasonably get from the technology, which is 24Mbps downstream and 1.5Mbps upstream.
It's fair to say that having a colo box at the datacentre with an unmetered symmetric 100Mbps link was kind of a big deal. Even better if you wanted to torrent peer with people in NSW, as the traffic would most likely go via our 1Gbps peering link to PIPE.
I didn't have a lot of money to buy a proper rackmount server (I spent all my money travelling to Japan), but I did have an old Shuttle compact desktop PC. I'd stripped most of the parts out for a new build when the (proprietary small-form-factor) power supply blew up, but the CPU and RAM stayed and that was plenty good enough to run a headless linux box. I had to make do with a spare ATX power supply to get it going again, which meant the outer shell wasn't going to fit any more...
The boss was never real happy about this setup, but she didn't get in the way and never started any fires so I'm counting it as a win.
- Shuttle XPC Barebones PC SN45G (released June 2003)
- AMD Athlon XP 2000+
- Probably 256MB or 512MB of DDR-400 RAM
- Maybe an Nvidia Geforce4 MX440
- Seagate 80gb PATA HDD
- Antec SmartPower PSU, probably about 350W rating like this reviewed model
It's goofy, but this was a-- no it's just goofy, I can't defend that. Anyway the copious amounts of electrical tape is to hold the PSU in place, it so happens that ATX dimensions fit perfectly on the rails that are intended for the 5.25" drive bay. The tape also creates a vibration-damped cradle for the hard drive - winning! The anime sticker came from signing up for the Rightstuf fan/members club 'cause I bought a lot of DVDs at the time. It uhhh... also helps with PSU retention? >_>
I did a solid amount of filesharing Linux-ISO-downloading on this machine in its time. I did eventually replace it with a legit 1U rackmount server that I bought from one of our customers for 500 bucks, but it wasn't nearly as cursed as this thing.