Water tank repurposed

[Adrian Caspersz]

Not mine, but I thought this was cool. Keeps the spinning rust company I guess.

[T i m]

1) It keeps all the stuff together, a-la 19" rack. 2) It saves him having to get it out the loft (as you might prefer if you wanted the space and it leaked etc). 3) It might help protect the roof woodwork should a bit catch fire (more so than a wooden shelving system etc). 4) It's cool (as you say). The re purposing of industrial equipment for domestic roles seems to still be 'in'. 5) For that purpose it works as well as a brand new one. ;-) 6) It's good for the environment (Reuse / re purpose).

Cheers, T i m

[Theo]

Aw, I was expecting at least some liquid cooling ;-)

Theo

(hmm, there's that nice big tank of heating oil outside, what could go wrong...)

[Brian Gaff (Sofa]

Anyone going to tell the blind about it? Brian

[spuorgelgoog]

It is a rectangular galvanised metal cold-water tank, placed on its side and hung on the wall with the open top to the front, with 19 inch rack strip mounted in it, and networking stuff and an HP microsever.

Owain

[Paul]

Start with a steel box.

Open in the front.

Two feet wide. Three feet high. At least two feet deep.

On the front face, the four corners of the box are reinforced with heavy steel triangular plates to prevent the steel box from deforming. The construction suggests the box could take several tons of force without failing.

The box has a gray finish, a bit of dirt, shows a bit of age.

Inside the box, are the uprights for a 19 inch rack system to hold electronics.

At the top, are two mains outlet bars, one above the other, holding a couple wall adapters and a lot of AC plugs.

Below that are two slim wide items holding a multitude of RJ45 Ethernet connectors. Short white patch cables, connect the ports from the lower item (router?) to a similar looking item above.

Below that are a couple home networking boxes, perhaps one is a broadband modem.

Below that is a thin "Sky box", with a single LED on the front right. There's no label or model number, to ferret out a purpose.

Below that is a 14 HP's ProLiant MicroServer Gen8 is an affordable starter server for businesses that need nothing more than centralized file services, printer management, and light virtualization.

The end result, is a wealthy persons home electronics collection, in a recycled grubby-looking-but-very-sturdy box. A box with HP branding, is not typical of your average home setup.

There's no sign I can see, that an angle grinder touched it.

Paul

[chrispvholmes]

Brilliant

I feel guilty for putting our (larger) one out for the bin men 20 years ago (but maybe it found it?s way to a reclamation yard).

[Bob Eager]

Well.... I have some of those Gen8 microservers. If you bought at the right time, they were little more than £100 each.

[Paul]

I'm not familiar with the product - it's the first one of those I've seen.

For that amount of money, normally you'd get a NAS with room for one disk drive. And the box would be a bit smaller.

There was one other kind of device, called an NDAS, which was half the price you name, but the difference was, each client machine needed a custom driver installed to talk to it. It didn't seem to use standard protocols. But was pretty cheap, and would have room for just the one drive. And these would be BYOD offerings, where you install your own disk in them.

Paul

[Bob Eager]

I have a number of Gen7 and Gen8 machines. There's a Gen7 with four bays that is the local NAS. Another is the VoIP PBX.

I've just set up a spare Gen8 to experiment as a jitsi server. Works well up to the point when the VDSL uplink becomes saturated.

These are all running FreeBSD, nothing proprietary.

[T i m]

<snip>

I do like the idea of Open / Free (free) and often see if there is such a solution that I can use, before considering the commercial / propriety ones.

A while back a mate gave me an Android TV box. I played with it a bit but didn't really have a need for it so stuck it away. When I started playing with TV / Network tuners recently I dug it back out and initial experiments suggested it was 'obsolete'. But then I found alternative ways to do things (downloading / installing an .apk manually rather than using the Play Store etc) and have now managed to make use of it.

Yesterday, I took on a mates box but have round that even further 'behind' (it's running Android V4.1.1 whereas mine is 5.2.2 (and I think they are up to V9 or so now?).

So it's like lots of things where they make a fundamental change, once they do you can be left behind (especially Apple hardware / IOS) and it seems Android 5.x seems to be one of those steps.

eg, You can't seem to get a recent version of Kodi to run on 4.1.1 but they have made a custom version that get's you up to 17.1, but that still doesn't seem to be late enough to get the TVHeadend PVR / client installed (or I can't as yet). ;-(

So, an alternative client solution could be a Raspberry Pi (4?) because at least you should be able to run the latest Linux on it as someone is bound to make it work. ;-)

Cheers, T i m