Hey!
I know this doesn't have much to do with SFF, but I don't really know where I "should" ask about this. Google wasn't too helpful.
I'm going to be moving into a house with some friends soon, and I'm going to be repurposing an old server to be our router and NAS and maybe to run a gaming VM for our living room or company to remote into. I've been trying to fit it into desktop chassis and it's just not the right approach, it's time for me to get a proper server chassis and maybe a rack for the switch and everything else.
If I need to, I can put the server/rack inside the house, we'll all have our own bedroom and the office area is small and mostly out of the way. But, if that server ends up in the office and it's at all noisy, it'd be pretty noticeable and probably unpleasant for anyone wanting to do something in there. I was asking one of the guys about it, and I mentioned I thought about trying to put it in the attic, and he suggested I put it in the utilities "shed."
So, the house is laid out with the bedrooms and bathrooms on one side all joined by a hall, the hall turns exits near the office (the front "central" entrance of the house), and spills out into the living area with the kitchen off to the side. The kitchen exits into the garage (with attic access) and the garage has a regular door to a shared patio with the office's entrance. If you exit the garage in the opposite direction of the street/front entrance, you pass by a utilities shed that shares a roof with the house. Then, in the back yard, there's a second, large, detached shed.
So, the three out-of-the-way options are the attic, the "utilities shed," and the "tools shed."
I'm taking for granted that most activities in either shed will be pretty noisy, so 3+ fans running 100% shouldn't be much worse than white noise in one of those rooms. In the attic, I'm pretty sure the server could be positioned to where it never bothers anyone.
The attic will be most isolated from Louisiana's humidity, I think. Unfortunately, the attic will probably absorb and retain a lot of heat, probably staying over 100F in the summer. It would also technically have the shortest Ethernet run to each outlet in the home, and depending on the layout of the attic, could even be strategically positioned to have a roughly equal distance from each jack.
The utilities shed shares a roof with the rest of the house, so running Ethernet to and from it would be fairly easy. With the attic over its head and the somewhat neglected construction/windows, even if it gets up to outside temperatures during the day it should sink back down into the 80-90F at night time. I don't have any measure of the relative humidity, but I don't think there's any air circulation system or modern insulation to help trap outside's humidity out.
The tools shed is pretty much the same as the utilities shed except for the fact that I'd have to run (est. 150ft~) Ethernet to the shed, it'd almost certainly be worth just running one industrial (10Gb+) cable for each NIC in use on the server and using a separate switch inside the house. That could complicate or increase battery backup costs? But this would definitely be the most out-of-the-way solution. Because this shed isn't connected to the house, I'm taking for granted it does the least to fight off the elements in terms of heat and humidity.
I'm fairly sure that any of these options are sheltered from rain, but could always rig something up to be even more sure.
I know this doesn't have much to do with SFF, but I don't really know where I "should" ask about this. Google wasn't too helpful.
I'm going to be moving into a house with some friends soon, and I'm going to be repurposing an old server to be our router and NAS and maybe to run a gaming VM for our living room or company to remote into. I've been trying to fit it into desktop chassis and it's just not the right approach, it's time for me to get a proper server chassis and maybe a rack for the switch and everything else.
If I need to, I can put the server/rack inside the house, we'll all have our own bedroom and the office area is small and mostly out of the way. But, if that server ends up in the office and it's at all noisy, it'd be pretty noticeable and probably unpleasant for anyone wanting to do something in there. I was asking one of the guys about it, and I mentioned I thought about trying to put it in the attic, and he suggested I put it in the utilities "shed."
So, the house is laid out with the bedrooms and bathrooms on one side all joined by a hall, the hall turns exits near the office (the front "central" entrance of the house), and spills out into the living area with the kitchen off to the side. The kitchen exits into the garage (with attic access) and the garage has a regular door to a shared patio with the office's entrance. If you exit the garage in the opposite direction of the street/front entrance, you pass by a utilities shed that shares a roof with the house. Then, in the back yard, there's a second, large, detached shed.
So, the three out-of-the-way options are the attic, the "utilities shed," and the "tools shed."
I'm taking for granted that most activities in either shed will be pretty noisy, so 3+ fans running 100% shouldn't be much worse than white noise in one of those rooms. In the attic, I'm pretty sure the server could be positioned to where it never bothers anyone.
The attic will be most isolated from Louisiana's humidity, I think. Unfortunately, the attic will probably absorb and retain a lot of heat, probably staying over 100F in the summer. It would also technically have the shortest Ethernet run to each outlet in the home, and depending on the layout of the attic, could even be strategically positioned to have a roughly equal distance from each jack.
The utilities shed shares a roof with the rest of the house, so running Ethernet to and from it would be fairly easy. With the attic over its head and the somewhat neglected construction/windows, even if it gets up to outside temperatures during the day it should sink back down into the 80-90F at night time. I don't have any measure of the relative humidity, but I don't think there's any air circulation system or modern insulation to help trap outside's humidity out.
The tools shed is pretty much the same as the utilities shed except for the fact that I'd have to run (est. 150ft~) Ethernet to the shed, it'd almost certainly be worth just running one industrial (10Gb+) cable for each NIC in use on the server and using a separate switch inside the house. That could complicate or increase battery backup costs? But this would definitely be the most out-of-the-way solution. Because this shed isn't connected to the house, I'm taking for granted it does the least to fight off the elements in terms of heat and humidity.
I'm fairly sure that any of these options are sheltered from rain, but could always rig something up to be even more sure.
