Staple Design – Gwilym GJ …think, design, build, enjoy, think, evolve…..

Shoestring IT Cabinet Project

Wastebusters, where I work two days a week, is a community owned organisation and I have been chipping away at replacing their consumer grade tree of 8 port network switches with something that matches the needs of a growing office with up to a dozen people working at once. Plus with our move to VOIP the network needed to handle the increased demand and reliability requirement.

Today I fitted out a nice steel electrical switching box that turned up in the yard a few months ago as an IT cabinet. It houses:

• 20 port Cisco network switch Bis got from the eDay last year
• 2 x Linksys VOIP ATA’s that will talk to the Trixbox PABX and currently talk to Kiwilink
• A Linksys NSLU2 with a 320gb drive connected for shared storage
• A Linksys DSL modem and switch

I outfitted the box with some quite sketchy looking aluminium brackets that carry any heat away from the switch and ATA’s and stand the whole lot off so air can vent around everything. There are openings top and bottom so a thermal chimney effect will hopefully keep everything cool on summer days. While it looks a bit rough I think it will perform well and offer some protection from the main thing that seems to go wrong around here which is cables falling out of devices when they are knocked by somebody.

Photos by Simon