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The most simple way is to use an old narrow wooden cupboard. Screw bars to the left and right like the bars a drawer rests on. Simply lay each motherboard on a pair of boards -- fix with 1-2 screws if you like. You are looking for boards with everything vital onboard -- ethernet, video and HD controller. I'm unsure about the network boot, google for instructions. The board/BIOS must support LAN boot. Might be easiest to wait for the Linux client as diskless Linux machines are much easier to set up than diskless Windows machines (at least you find more people to ask how they did it). You can also use boards with SCSI onboard to connect multiple computers (mainboards) to one SCSI drive. Each must have his own partition (even for pure data disks or caching will destroy the data) and you need a bootloader (Linux always comes with one) to boot each board from its own partition. Might also work with other bus-based HD systems (serial-ATA??).

Cooling the rack is a problem. It depends on where you are located: if you live in a cool (all year) area you can suck cold air from outside through a tube into the bottom of the rack and suck out warm air at the top through a second tube. If you use flexible tubes you can use one single wall hole. Maybe you have a very cool basement room all year but this thing will eventually warm it... If you live in a moderate or even warm climate you need active cooling by some sort of air conditioner. Don't make it TOO COLD as water vapour will enter the rack and condense on the electronics. That's the reason why it's cool ( ) but deadly (for the boards) to build the rack from an old fridge. At least if you use the frigde to cool the farm.

Warning: Always install a wooden rack in a room (e.g. basement) where it is installed far enough from any flammable materials so if a short circuit or anything like that causes fire only the rack will burn to ashes.

Install a cheap monitor and keyboard with a KVM-switch (Keyboard, Video, Mouse - switch) to administer ALL the boards or only temporarily use a keyboard and monitor on any board for installation only. Then install VNC to your machines and administer them remotely on your network. As there is only little network traffic from/to the boards, you can cascade as many cheapo 4/8 port hubs as you need and have only one single network uplink to connect to your LAN.

If everything runs you can start buying LEDs and stuff to do some decent case modding


Best, Stefan.

There are sources for windows but most assume a Linux workstation as the host of the network drive. This is part of the challenge



This is exactly what I am currently doing but if I buy these low end machines they come with power supplies, cooling fans, hard drives, video cards, LAN etc all for $45. So while the rack idea is cool it seems simpler just to buy the old machines which already have cases, network them and then use something like Real VNC to admin. Of course if it is a hobby this gets boring pretty fast to just hook up old machines - thus playing with how to boot windows remotely becomes an interesting challenge.

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Hello Steve with an agenda---how is the little one doing