You might be an electronic engineer if… (IV)
November 28, 2010
… you custom-build a 1U Network Accessible Storage box that is quiet, versatile and reliable (but an EMC atrocity).
Liberace - Closed
This is an old project that has been serving me well for years, but after a remote distribution upgrade stopped it booting (caused by a missing depedency between udev and the custom kernel) I had to pop it (“Liberace”) open up to dig out the root drive so I could tend to it on another machine. Hence I had a chance to take a few poor quality photos and document the build.
Liberace - Open
Basically it’s a simple PC build with a 1.5TB HDD but there are a few fun intricacies…
Liberace has a Flex-ATX Socket 370 (i.e. Pentium III era) motherboard and a 1.2 GHz Via C3-Nehemia CPU. The motherboard is an industrial model, designed for long-term reliability (but this didn’t stop me having to replace electrolytic capacitors that had developed horrible leaks). The CPU is a low power device, chosen to reduce electricity costs and fan noise. In benchmarks it can’t really outperform a 800 MHz Pentium III for number crunching but it’s fit for the purpose and its built-in cryptographic functions provide virtually overhead-free full-disk encryption.
Liberace - Non-leaking capacitors, CPU and Flash
The operating system (originally Slackware, then various versions of Ubuntu, now Ubuntu 10.04 LTS), occupies most of a 1GB compact flash card connected as an ATA device. The card also contains various services and software intended to make Liberace more useful than your run-of-the-mill NAS — as well as serving files over NFS and SMB, Liberace undertakes various housekeeping, update and backup tasks autonomously and can provide a Fluxbox desktop over an entirely virtual X session for running GUI-only software like JDownloader within java.
Liberace - PSU and RAM
Power is provided from an external 12V DC brick and a PicoPSU ATX DC/DC supply. You may notice one stick of PC133 RAM is marked “BAD” — this is because it fails memory tests and would result in an unstable system if it were not for the BadRAM kernel patch, which allows the (tiny) faulty regions to be avoided. This isn’t something I’d do on an important system but it has proven to be remarkably stable here.
The system uses 40 watts under full load and, since it uses only one fan (drawing external air directly onto the CPU heatsink and out across the motherboard and HDD), makes a quiet and unobtrusive always-on Linux box.
