When Ironworking met I.T.

Today, one of our techs, who has a diploma in metalworking, found a unique solution to mounting a hard drive rack into a proprietary Dell 5 1/2 inch bay. This particular machine was destined to be a server and was to have 3 terabyte 3.5'' drives mounted. The rack was blocked by two protrusions from the case, and had means of being secured to the chassis.

Our tech whipped out his multi tool, used skilled metalworking techniques to bend back the protrusions right at their base, placed the hard drive rack into the chassis. To secure the rack to the chassis, he used the same protrusions, bending them back and right over until they where flush with the bottom of the hard disk rack. That provided a solid mounting base for the rack and required no holes drilled or reamed and made the 5.5 inch bay usable for the 3.5 inch drives.

Truly an 'outside the box' solution, to fall back on iron working techniques for I.T. tasks, but also a great hardware hack that solved the issue in the minimum of time, no expense and with ease.

The idea we're trying to get across here is to always look at problems from other angles; very often one can find a solution from an 'non-related' field.

apt-cache: how to use

So, today . I'm going to write to appeal to our Debian/Ubuntu/related distro using  readers.

In case you where unaware, you can download whole repository of packages for your Doing greatly speeds up updating, and if your in the business of making computers. (for example free-geek) having apt-cache set up will save you both tonnes of time and bandwidth, and thus money. And its real easy to do. Install the OS of choice (i.e. to cache ubuntu, install ubuntu server

A open a console and type the following.

sudo apt-get install apt-cache
sudo apt-cache

(then type yes to the fact its going to download about 70 gigs of files)


One of the great things about this, is you can put old, 'obsolete' Pentium III back into use, as an FTP file server does not require a lot of systems resources, which is another bonus, as you help protect the environment by avoiding electronic waste.