I present to you one of the projects that I have been working on for the past year. When I moved in and started fixing up my (new to me) house I found a 1950′s coke machine left out in the back yard (There was a lot of random junk out there). It took me a while to figure out what to do with it, but once I decided I wanted a video arcade room in my house, I knew exactly what to do. It turned out to be the perfect size to fit a custom tailored server rack! Below you will find pictures of the build process. You could always skip to the bottom to see the finished product, but where’s the fun in that?

The machine looks like it was brought to the yard on a wooden skid… that had in the years since rotted out. This caused the machine to slowly rock forward and have the door open. The open door let decades of weather destroy the interior. Luckily for our project we didn’t really care too much about that.

We figured that the best way to get the center drum out was to lay  the machine on its back. The drum was designed to hold 250 glass bottles and is, like the rest of the machine, made with solid steel.

Reopening the casket.

The center drum was held in place by a combination of gravity and pressure. We used wooden boards to pry the drum out. It was heavy, but detaching it was easier than we thought. Actually lifting it over the lip was more problematic.

Luckily that can be fixed with a time lapse!

We had a bit of a… gravity error. The slippery snow didn’t help matters. It turns out the balance of the machine gets really weird when you remove more than half of the insides. Luckily there was no damage to either of us or the machine.

Because of the snow and other debris in the back yard we had to go the long way around the house. I decided to take a picture of it while it was on the driveway.

Prepairing to bring it up the stairs to the "Workshop"

We started the modifications by drilling a series of pilot holes and then using a saws-all to cut the back of the case off. Once we got one of the sides done we started running into an issue with vibration. There was actually an inch or so of fiberglass insulation sandwiched between two layers of sheet metal. This caused them to shake more and more wildly the further John got. To rectify the problem I put on some heavy leather gloves and held the sheets in place as he cut.

After the back was cut off John and I took turns grinding down the lightly rusted metal on the inside of the machine. Our lithium-ion batteries for our drill certainly got a work out. Both John and I have a matching set of Milwaukee 28V tools, so we were able to have two batteries charging at a time. As soon as one of us drained the battery in the drill we could swap it out for a fresh one and have the other person keep working.

I found a used APC server rack on craigslist for just under $200, so John and I took my pickup truck over and loaded it up. It was actually in really good condition so I felt a little bad about the fact that I was about to cut it up.

Once we got the rack back to the house we started dissembling it. John unscrewed the front while I unscrewed the back and it no time we had all of the extra parts stripped out.

The server rack and the coke machine meet for the first time.

Before we cut the server rack down to size John and I took turns welding steel reinforcement bars onto the rack. This was our first real welding project so we practiced for a couple of hours before hand. The scrap pieces from the coke machine made for great practice. We used a small arc welder from Harbor Freight that plugged in to a 120V 15A outlet. Unfortunately the electrical in my house hadn’t been finished yet, so we had to run an extension cord from the boiler room.

After the reinforcements were in place John cut the top of the rack off. It makes a really cool coffee table!

The above picture is of the first test fit. We had some issues getting the top of the rack through the space we cut, so John took another couple fractions of an inch off the rack. It’s snug, but it works well. Note that this is one of the few times we loaded the rack through the rear of the machine (instead of through the door on the front).

The insulation and jagged metal edges needed to be protected so I cut strips from what used to be the back of the machine. John then drilled holes and screwed the pieces together. It was still too sharp for our tastes, so we went back to Home Depot and got some L pieces.

We couldn’t find exactly what we wanted, but these ones worked out pretty well. The L pieces are kind of thin, so they tended to warp slightly as John mounted them. After some work he got them looking how he wanted them.

Once John got the L covers in place I set to work prepping the inside of the Coke machine for new paint. In hindsight we should have painted the inside first and then mounted the shiny L pieces. Oh well. I just had to be a little more careful as I sprayed paint on. I used a paint sprayer powered by a separate air compressor to blow the paint on. I think it looks a lot better than it would have if I had tried to use roll on paint or spray cans.

After the grey primer was dry I put on two coats of black paint. I used Rust-olieum paints throughout the project.

I should mention that it was rather cold while we were doing all of this work. We were in the process of rebuilding my house after striping it down to the bare frame. I used a kerosene heater to help the paint dry (and also keep us a little warmer, I suppose). It was probably in the mid 30′s (‘F) at the time.

I put two coats of black paint on the rack. It took a couple of cycles of paint-dry-flip it over-missed a spot-repeat before I finally got everything. Server racks have a lot of spaces that are difficult to get to and see, but I wanted to make sure I got everything, not just the parts that would be visible.

After I finished painting the rack I started on the exterior of the Coke Machine. Once again I began the process of swapping out battery after battery in the drill. A corded drill may have been more practical from that perspective, but the cord would have been really annoying for working on the top of the machine, and besides, we had two sets of power tools and batteries to work with

Candy Apple Red

Here you can see the contrast between one partial coat of fresh paint and the original, sanded down, old paint. The paint that I found was a bit brighter than what I was aiming for, but it was the only one from Rustolium that was even close. It turned out to work wonderfully, even if it isn’t exactly an “official” Coca-Cola color.

The above picture is after one full coat of new paint. After it dried I put another full coat and then an additional set of touch-up spots.

I left the detail work to my friend Trey and my girlfriend Christina while I worked on wiring up some Ethernet runs through the house. They took their time and did an amazing job. All of Trey’s experience painting Warhammer miniatures paid off

The final paint job, before removing the painter’s tape.

After all of the paint was dry I reattached the chrome pieces. The bottle opener still works!

My friend James helped us move the rack into the arcade and then slide the cage in place. From this angle you can see one of the braces (top right of the rack) that John welded to the rack to help hold it in place. The braces make sure the rack stays stationary but also prevents the rack from sliding in from the back side.

John posing in front of the newly installed server rack.

It turns out that the floor was kind of warped, so we used plywood to prop the front of the rack up and make it level. It’s hard to tell, but the coke machine is actually slid into an old doorway that leads to the boiler room. I picked this location because the servers will suck in cool air from the living area of the house and blow out the hot exhaust freely into the boiler room. After several months running in this configuration the only heat-related issue was from a small fanless fit-PC that was sitting on top of the router. I moved it to its own shelf and didn’t have any more problems.

All of my gear mounted to the rack

On the front of my rack I have  (from top to bottom) a 24 port gigabit switch, an 80 port Fast Ethernet Cisco Switch,  1U Firewall, 2U KVM (with two user outputs. One for the rack and one to go to my desk), 1U backup router,  4U backup fileserver, Monitor, 4U Primary fileserver, and finally a 1U Webserver. Below the rack, where the compressor used to be, you can find the APC UPS that I’m using for now. The load is fairly high on it, so I’ll be getting second one soon.

From the back of the rack you can see the centralized CAT5e run, 96 port patch panel, and external 8-bay hard drive enclosure. All said, I have 32 TB of raw hard drive space connected. Less than half of that us useable due to backups and redundancy.

Since I had all of the walls taken apart for re-doing the house’s electrical system I took the opportunity to install centralized CAT5e throughout. I ran everything through 1/2 or 3/4 inch tubing so that I could replace it later if I decided to upgrade to CAT6A or fiber or anything else. In the above picture you can see the FiOS ONT as well as the dedicated 30A lines (one is 120V and one is 240V) that are run to the rack.

The entire house is connected to a generator (currently 3.5KW gasoline but I plan to upgrade to at least a 10KW diesel) as well as my military truck which has a 3.5KW inverter from Outback. This allowed me to keep the house (and computers) up and running when we had a storm come through that took out power for two days.

I would like to thank John for his extensive help with the project and also Trey, Christina, and James for their help as well.

Here’s the answer to the tricky part:

Fuse is a little special (I’m sure for good reason) in that it doesn’t like other people running it. Whenever I would mount the remote directory via SSHFS it would work fine for the virtual machine, but I could never successfully share it out via Samba. It turns out that Fuse wasn’t letting Samba gain access because Samba runs as a different user than the user that mounted the file system.

The fix:

Edit /etc/fuse.conf so that the line “user_allow_other” is uncommented (or, if the file isn’t there, touch it and then add the line).

Then mount the SSHFS to the directory that you are sharing via Samba. The key part is that you must use the “allow_other” option.

For example: $ sshfs example.com:/media/alpha /media/remotessh/ -o allow_other

That fixed it for me. If that still doesn’t work, double check your samba config file to make sure the permissions, passwords, etc are all configured properly and that your user account is added to the “fuse” group. For reference: My server is running Ubuntu 10.10 and my client VM is running Ubuntu 11.04. Good luck!

http://www.wynia.org/ was a great help for me figuring this out.

As you may have noticed, I’ve been rather quiet over the past several months. That is because I’ve been spending the vast majority of my time on a somewhat unique project. I haven’t mentioned this project much on the public internet because I didn’t want to start the project with extremely high expectations and then never post about the work being done. However, after starting this project at the end of May 2010 my friends and I have come a long way. My goals are in sight and progress is being made every day.

Rest assured that there will be write-ups and many photos from throughout the process. And yes, I am being very vague.

For now I’ll leave you with the above  image. My friends already know what is going on, and I will reveal details on the internet once the project is “Live.”

Talking after a game

Today we celebrated my brother’s birthday and the new tires for the truck by gaming in the Kingstowne parking lot. After some struggling with the inverter everything worked out perfectly.

The new tires look great

I’ll post more pictures in a day or two…

As far as supporting the needs of 10 to 12 people during the heat of a LAN party is concerned,the truck so far is doing well. We’ve installed 16 Ethernet jacks throughout the inside of the box as well as 4 jacks on the outside. Using a Cisco switch with VLANs it is possible to reassign the ports to operate on different networks (secure and insecure comes to mind) as well as connecting to a WiFi router that can have multiple SSIDs.

Power for the rig comes from a salvaged 900 Watt APC uninterpretable power supply connected to two strings of 3 115Ahr deep cycle batteries (total of 6 batteries = 345Ahr@24V). The inverter is normally powered by a standard RV hookup located on the front driver’s side of the box (120V household power) but it can also be run off of the Deuce’s 60 Amp alternator. After some testing I found that I would get about 50 Amps from the alternator while idling, which is enough to power the inverter at max load (around 30 Amps) with enough power left over to charge the battery bank at the same time (around 20 Amps). We have a battery isolator connected off of the starter that allows the alternator to charge the drive batteries and the luxury load batteries at the same time without damaging or discharging them. I have a disconnect switch on the dashboard next to a 60 Amp Ammeter so that I can select between charging or not charging the rear battery bank. Once the weather clears up I need to replace the belts on the engine because they are in bad shape and squeal whenever I recharge the batteries.

The orange glowing switch on the left toggles the connection between the inverter and the umbilical. If it is in the up position it is disconnected from the RV plug on the outside and instead connected to the small blue “starter” inverter on the right. If it is in the down position it is drawing power from the RV plug. It glows orange whenever there is any source of power leading into the inverter. The two jacks next to the switch are connected directly to the RV plug so that I can run loads that draw more power than the inverter can put out (such as vacuum cleaners or even an AC unit)

The body of the Deuce seems to be in really good shape. I got lucky and fount a 1985 Deuce, so there aren’t nearly as many signs of age as their usually are on these trucks. There were a few spots that had surface rust but those were easy enough to clean up. The biggest problem is on the front passenger side of the box there are some rust strips that go clean through the box. I think there might also be something on the roof in that corner as water seems to seep in from the top and drip down to the floor. The floorboards were rotted in that one section when we got the truck. This spring we are going to pull some of the shelve/desk units out so that we can working on cleaning that mess up.

All of the stock electrical lines seem to work, though there is a ground fault issue on the driver’s side power strip. It works adequately; we just can’t connect the truck to a GFI outlet. I’ve replaced the 5 interior lights with 3 Watt LEDs to save on power. I’ll probably upgrade them once LED technology gets a little better (and cheaper) but they work well enough for now. It’s like bright moon light. The 24V lights also work, though we hardly ever have the power breaker thrown off to use them. We plan to mount a few halogen lights around the outside of the box so that we can have some area lights for when we use the truck at night.

You can probably figure out that all of this gear lends itself well to helping out in emergency situations, like when a storm comes through and knocks out power to an area. Eventually I plan on buying a 3kw pure sine wave inverter so that refrigerators can be run off of battery power, but that is a bit down the road. John and I have a lot more plans for this truck.

The new Ammeter and switch on the dashboard

The front passenger side network jack

The rear passenger side power jack.

Rear Center Network Jack

The Breaker Boxes and Raceways

The front driver's side electrical sockets and umbilical

The engine and the two tubes that lead to the Ammeter and Switch

The Battery Isolator connected to the Starter and Alternator

I got a new tablet computer / netbook last week for taking notes in class. I really like this tablet, but it has a few quirks that really need to be ironed out. I’ll get to the complaints in a moment.

The first thing I noticed about this computer once it arrived is that it is very small and very light. It has an 8.9 inch LED backlit display and weighs around 2lbs; it is very portable. It only has 32GB of hard drive space, of which the operating system accounts for nearly half. Asus makes up for the small drive by having TWO SD card slots, which is wonderful. One of the slots is protected by a semi-permanent cover and is labelled “Expansion Slot” while the other slot is the more traditional front facing open access design. Both slots are spring loaded.

They key asset that this netbook leverages is that its screen rotates and flips down to convert the computer into a tablet. Sadly the T91MT does not have a accelerometer to determine the screen orientation automatically. Instead one must either press and hold the button next to the power switch or use ctrl + an arrow key to select the screen orientation. The button stopped functioning for me as I was removing the bloatware that came with the system, and even after reinstalling all of the Asus software it still does not function. I have also not found out how to rehotkey the rotate button.

The single largest problem I have with this netbook is how slow it is. It only comes with 1GB of RAM and uses the slower 1.33GHz Atom single core processor. I really would have appreciated the 1.6GHz chip and slightly better graphics, but I knew about all of this when I got it. It preforms adequately for taking notes, although it does struggle when I am drawing graphs during math class while recording audio of the lecture. You can’t really play games on this computer, although I did manage to tweak Warcraft III to run at around 10FPS on DoTA, which is better than some other old computers. Web sites with heavy flash usage are almost unusable, including Youtube. The videos play, but there is a lot of stuttering. I’m also not sure why Asus included the webcam as no software I have is able to stream and receive video calls (including Gtalk or several SIP programs). The camera stutters so badly that it causes the audio to ripple and lag as well, making it completely unusable.

I’ve loaded Ubuntu Netbook Remix 9.10 to one of the SD cards and found out that the touch screen doesn’t work out of the box. I haven’t done too much work to try and get it working, but I thought I would let you know.

The power supply is also really small and very easy to carry around. The netbook runs on 12v and 3A with a 10% tolerance, so this is theoretically capable of running directly off of a lead acid battery. While it is also technically capeable of being wired directly into a cars electrical system I would recommend getting a car adapter of some sort in order to clean up the power from the car.

I’ve paired this tablet with my Android G1 in order to tether my internet access for use on the go. It works extremely well. I would recommend making a shortcut on your desktop for the bluetooth profile so that it becomes easier to connect the two paired devices. It takes a few seconds for Windows to setup the connection, but once established you get the full 1mbs connection that bluetooth can provide. In a 3G zone I consistently get 800kbs downloads and 130kbs uploads.

The battery life is nice, clocking in at around four to four and a half hours for my usage (1/2 screen brightness, high performance mode). The T91MT can be found online for around $480, so you pay a good deal extra for the benefit of the touch screen. I think that the next generation of this product should iron out most of the issues I have with this model. Overall I really like this little computer, in spite of its limitations.

It’s way better than an iPad and cheaper too

Not the most interesting video, but some people requested that I post what video I had of the most recent LAN party. The game of choice was Warcraft III with DoTA, Castle Fight, Line Tower Wars, and Battle Tanks. There were about 12 people (depending on what specific time). We had 5 people in the Deuce and a Half and another 5 people in my computer room.

I wonder if I will ever be able to beat this record…

Today is the day that I finally had to reboot my Linux router. It was able to stay running for 390 days and 57 minutes. I was able to keep it running through multiple hour long power outages, migrating ISPs, and countless other daily issues. Alas, a problem with the hard drive caused the system to start haning any time it needed to access the drive, causing the internet to become practically unuseable. It took a reboot, disk check, and some error correction to get it working again. It worked fine after that for 15 minutes or so, but now I’m back to the same problem. A temporary solution might be cutting the bittorrent sharing of the new ubuntu release. There might be too many open connections for the router to handle in ram, or it might be trying to cache something. I’ll update when I’ve figured it out.

I’ve decided to record my NAS data storage use on a daily basis. This way I can plot an even more accurate graph should I do this again in the future. I might make a post about my “progress” every few months or so.