Adapter Salad: Making Your Own Server Cables Because HP Won’t Sell Them To You

August 8, 2024 by 24 Comments

The world is tough and uncaring sometimes, especially if you’re at home tinkering with HP Enterprise equipment. If you’re in the same boat as [Neel Chauhan], you might have found that HPE is less than interested in interacting with small individual customers. Thus, when a cable was needed, [Neel] was out of luck. The simple solution was to assemble a substitute one instead!

[Neel] had a HPE ProLiant ML110 Gen11 server, which was to be used as network-attached storage (NAS). Unfortunately, it was bought as an open box, and lacked an appropriate serial-attached SCSI (SAS) cable. Sadly, HPE support was of no assistance in sourcing one.

SlimSAS LP x8 to dual MiniSAS x4 cables aren’t easy to find from anyone else, it turns out. Thus, [Neel] turned to Amazon for help sourcing a combination of parts to make this work. A SlimSAS LP 8X to 2x MiniSAS SFF-8643 cable was used, along with a pair of Mini SAS SFF-8087 to SAS HD SFF-8643 female adapters. From there, SFF-8087 cables could be used to hook up to the actual SAS devices required. The total cost? $102.15.

The stack of cables and adapters looks a bit silly, but it works—and it got [Neel]’s NAS up and running. It’s frustrating when you have to go to such lengths, but it’s not the first time we’ve seen hackers have to recreate obscure cables or connectors from scratch! What’s the craziest adapter salad you’ve ever made?

Tunneling TCP By File Server

June 4, 2024 by 15 Comments

You want to pass TCP traffic from one computer to another, but there’s a doggone firewall in the way. Can they both see a shared file? Turns out, that’s all you need. Well, that and some software from [fiddyschmitt].

If you think about it, it makes sense. Unix treats most things as a file, so it is pretty easy to listen on a local TCP port and dump the data into a shared file. The other side reads the file and dumps the same data to the desired TCP port on its side. Another file handles data in the other direction. Of course, the details are a bit more than that, but that’s the basic idea.

Performance isn’t going to be wonderful, and the files keep growing until the program detects that they are bigger than 10 megabytes. When that happens, the program purges the file.

The code is written in C# and there are binaries for Windows and Linux on the release page. The examples show using shared files via Windows share and RDP, but we imagine any sort of filesystem that both computers can see would work. Having your traffic stuffed into a shared file is probably not great for security but, you know, you are already jumping a firewall, so…

Of course, no firewall can beat an air gap. Unless you can control the fans or an LED.

Big Server Fan Becomes Fume Extractor

May 16, 2024 by 12 Comments

[Anthony Kouttron] wanted a fume extractor for his personal electronics lab, but he didn’t like the look of the cheap off-the-shelf units that he found. Ultimately, he figured it couldn’t be that hard to build own portable fume extractor instead.

The build is based around a mighty 110-watt centrifugal fan from an IBM server that’s rated at approximately 500 CFM. It’s a hefty unit, and it should be, given that it retails at over $200 on DigiKey. [Anthony] paired this fan with off-the-shelf HEPA and activated carbon filters. These are readily available from a variety of retailers. He didn’t want to DIY that part of the build, as the filter selection is critical to ensuring the unit actually captures the bad stuff in the air. He ended up building a custom power supply for the 12-volt fan, allowing it to run from common drill batteries for practicality’s sake.

Few of us have need for such a beefy fume extractor on the regular. Indeed, many hobbyists choose to ignore the risk from soldering or 3D printing fumes. Still, for those that want a beefy fume extractor they can build themselves, it might be worth looking over [Anthony]’s initial work.

We’ve seen some other great DIY fume extractors before, too. Even those that use drill batteries! If you’ve been cooking up your own solution, don’t hesitate to drop us a line!

A diagram from the article, showing the router being used in a car for streaming media to multiple portable devices at once

A Portable DLNA Server Hack Helps You Tame OpenWRT

May 5, 2024 by 12 Comments

A good amount of hacks can be done with off-the-shelf hardware – what’s more, it’s usually available all over the world, which means your hacks are easier to build for others, too. Say, you’ve built something around a commonly available portable router, through the magic of open-source software. How do you make the fruits of your labour easy to install for your friends and blog readers? Well, you might want to learn a thing or two from [Albert], who shows us a portable DLNA server built around a GL-MT300N-V2 pocket router.

[Albert]’s blog post is a tutorial on setting it up, with a pre-compiled binary image you can flash onto your router. Flash it, prepare a flash drive with your media files, connect to the WiFi network created by the router, run the VLC player app, and your media library is with you wherever you go.

Now, a binary image is good, but are you wondering how it was made, and how you could achieve similar levels of user-friendliness in your project? Of course, here’s the GitHub repository with OpenWRT configuration files used to build this image, and build instructions are right there in the README. If you ever needed a reference on how to make commonly available OpenWRT devices do your bidding automagically, this is it.

This is an elegant solution to build an portable DLNA server that’s always with you on long rides, and, think of it, it handily beats a typical commercialized alternative, at a lower cost. Want software upgrades? Minor improvements and fixes? Security patches? Everything is under your control, and thanks to the open-source nature of this project, you have a template to follow. There won’t always be a perfectly suited piece of hardware on the market, of course, as this elegant dual-drive Pi-based NAS build will attest.

Webserver Runs On Android Phone

March 27, 2024 by 36 Comments

Android, the popular mobile phone OS, is essentially just Linux with a nice user interface layer covering it all up. In theory, it should be able to do anything a normal computer running Linux could do. And, since most web servers in the world are running Linux, [PelleMannen] figured his Android phone could run a web server just as well as any other Linux machine and built this webpage that’s currently running on a smartphone, with an additional Reddit post for a little more discussion.

The phone uses Termux (which we’ve written about briefly before) to get to a Bash shell on the Android system. Before that happens, though, some setup needs to take place largely involving installing F-Droid through which Termux can be installed. From there the standard SSH and Apache servers can be installed as if the phone were running a normal Linux The rest of the installation involves tricking the phone into thinking it’s a full-fledged computer including a number of considerations to keep the phone from halting execution when the screen locks and other phone-specific issues.

With everything up and running, [PelleMannen] reports that it runs surprisingly well with the small ARM system outputting almost no heat. Since the project page is being hosted on this phone we can’t guarantee that the link above works, though, and it might get a few too many requests to stay online. We wish it were a little easier to get our pocket-sized computers to behave in similar ways to our regular laptops and PCs (even if they don’t have quite the same amount of power) but if you’re dead-set on repurposing an old phone we’ve also seen them used to great effect in place of a Raspberry Pi.

An open top of a black PC case. Inside we can see an aluminum extruded mini PC case inside the 5" optical drive bay. A Samsung SSD sits along the back wall of the case and a flash drive sits between the front of the 3D printed "drive" and the actual mini PC.

Outdated HP Microserver Gets A New Brain

March 3, 2024 by 6 Comments

What to do if you have a really cool old HP MicroServer that just can’t keep up with the demands of today? [jacksonliam] decided to restomod it by installing a mini PC into the drive bay.

The HP N54L MicroServer was still running, but its soldered CPU and non-standard motherboard made a simple upgrade impossible. Evaluating the different options, [jacksonliam] decided to save the case and PSU by transplanting an Intel Alder Lake mini PC into the drive bay with 3D printed brackets and heat set inserts.

Selecting a fanless “router” model to increase reliability, he was able to find an M.2 to mini-SAS adapter to attach the four drive cage to the NVME slot on the new PC. Power is supplied via the 12 V line on the ATX power supply and one of the mini PC’s Ethernet lines was broken out to a 3D printed PCI slot cover.

Looking for more ways to rejuvenate an old computer? How about putting a Mac mini inside an old iMac or a Raspberry Pi inside an Apple ][?

A Web Server, The Sixteen Bit Way

December 25, 2023 by 12 Comments

If you were to talk about sixteen bit computing in retrocomputing circles, misty-eyed reminiscences of the ST or Amiga would emerge. Both fine platforms, but oddly the elephant in the 16-bit room has become a victim of its own success. DOS, the granddaddy of all PC operating systems, seems oddly overshadowed by its 68000-based competitors in a way it certainly wasn’t back in the day. Perhaps it’s the often-atrocious graphics when cards designed for business graphics were pressed into gaming service, but it’s easy to forget that DOS PCs were the powerhouses of their day. They still pack a punch even in 2023, as [Lunduke] is here to show us by running a DOS web server. Take that, nginx! Continue reading “A Web Server, The Sixteen Bit Way” →