My First Wine Box Server

I wanted to build a cheap backup file server. Nothing too fancy, it didn't need a high spec, and I wanted it to be quiet and relatively low power, because it would be on 24/7. I purchased a cheap fanless mini-itx board, hard disk, memory, PSU, and set to building it into an old wooden wine box.

First to go in was the mini-itx motherboard. Holes were cut for network cable and for airflow. The thread on the 12V DC power socket was just about wide enough to let me screw it tightly to fix it through the backing board.

Two strips of wood were glued to the back to allow air to circulate more easily from the back side of the motherboard, and also to stop the screws holding it in from popping out through to the outside.

Two further strips were glued inside of the 'top' and 'bottom' of the box (left and right in the above picture), which allowed me to place two snugly fitting wooden props on top of them. The boot and data hard disks rested on the props, which kept them away from the heat sink to prevent any contact or electrical shorting, and permitted airflow.

More airflow holes were drilled (and later enlarged) into the top of the box allowed for a small chimney effect to draw cool air in and hot air out.

There was always a noticable 'warm wood' smell emanating from the box whenever it was switched on. I was of course concerned that it would catch fire, but the box was never under any great load, and the fragrance was actually quite nice. I ran some software called 'motherboard monitor' was was able to graph the cpu and system temperatures thoughout the day. After a couple of days, the temperature remained stable and acceptably low, so I didn't really worry about it.

A big red comedy power switch replaced the cheap little grey square one that came with the motherboard, and a four way USB hub in the shape of a robot was blu-tacked to the top to allow for easy file transfer by USB stick. The robot also has big blue glowing eyes which were useful to show that the server was powered on. The actual power and hard disk activity lights aren't even fixed permanently, and are just unceremoniously poking through one of the airflow holes.

One spare install of Windows XP later, and it worked great! I also included a webcam, some software to take pictures and turn the webcam into a security camera, and installed IIS to let me view the latest picture. Port 80 was forwarded from my home router, and hey presto, remote webcam monitoring!

With no fans, and barely audible hard disk activity, this was an ideal server to have in the living room, connected via ethernet cable to my home router. Thankfully it never did catch fire, and in the five or so years it was running, it was powered on 24/7. A great first 'maker' project!