Continuing from the previous post, I found photos of one other underfloor server that I built. Well, one photo that's useful, the rest are the same thing but with poorer lighting.
Straight away you can tell this isn't a plastic storage tub affair - this one's wood, baby! More wood than a Fractal Design North, but a little less elegant. That's all of my highschool woodworking skills on display.
This case was custom-built to fit between the floor joists, and be about the same depth. That way it can rest on the sheet of plywood that I screwed into the joists, and slides in and out like a drawer. It's a headless server, so it only needs power and networking connections.
You might be curious about the red thing there; that's a missile switch cover which prevents accidental pushes of the button underneath it. It makes a very satisfying KACHUNK sound when you use it. 😌
If you look really closely you can see some shiny metal sandwiched with the plywood top and bottom plates. That's indeed alfoil, because... well, PCs are meant to be shielded right?
As for the components inside, it's an old Dell desktop board jammed into the new case. Because Dell are a bit special, there's a lot of non-standard parts and connectors, so you have to take the whole thing as it comes.
- Intel Pentium III 600MHz (E-variant)
- Dell custom motherboard
- 384 MB of DDR RAM
- Probably a low-profile Geforce video card that I scrounged from somewhere
- Probably a Realtek 100Mbps network card
- Dell custom 200-250 Watt PSU, with a friggen not-ATX motherboard connector on it 🤬
I definitely ran Windows 2000 Advanced Server on this box, because I wanted a remote desktop session to run a bittorrent client on. Remote desktop was a thing, but it was really gimped on desktop versions of Windows and didn't have independent desktop sessions, making it about on par with VNC. Plus I had a copy of Windows Server, so why not use that to learn and experiment? I ran the Azureus BT client on there and it was nice.