Our state-of-the-art eco-friendly high-availability server farm is housed in the shed. Like all Junk Pile Projects, it is made from junk.
Although we already had some fairly new hardware, barely 25 years old, the kind donation of a high-end Compaq computer saw the foundation of the server farm.
Assembled in Taiwan in 1998, the server was only 14 years old when commissioned. It comes equipped with a 433Mhz AMD-K6 processor, 64Mb memory and a 3Gb hard disc.
After a hardware failure on the first server after only 14 months of service and with the warranty expired, the server was upgraded. Our second server comes equiped with a Pentium MMX 166Mhz processor and 48Mb memory.
A hardware failure on the second server after barely 3 years of service has forced us to upgrade once more. The third server is a Raspberry Pi Model B, which was only 3 years old when installed. This comes equipped with a 700MHz ARM11 processor, 512MB memory and a 4GB SD card.
Power comes from our solar farm. Unfortunately we couldn't find enough junk to build this, so a contractor was commissioned to supply and install the necessary equipment.
A PowerWare 9110 Uninterruptable Power Supply is available to store surplus power from the solar farm to keep our server farm running through the night. The National Grid is also on hand to provide extra power when required.
Although reliable and with the capability to power the server farm for a week, the donation of a failed battery pack enabled the use of some 18650 cells in a more efficient Uninterruptable Power Supply, allowing the retirement of the PowerWare after 9 years.
Air conditioning for all this high-tech equipment is sustaibably constructed from eco-friendly gaps between the shed door and frame.
The server farm is mounted on a custom built shelf-mount system constructed from carefully selected plywood.
With the introduction of the third server, a new innovative pin-mount system has been developed using high quality pinboard pins to secure the server to the shed wall.
Our internet connection is provided by EE.
Since EE block incoming email, we use a protection contre les spams free spam filter to deliver our mail.