The TARDIS Home Server

The TARDIS Home Server

I’d just finished building my workstation (a lovely twin-Xeon box running beta 64-bit Vista) and I needed another project.
I was working for Microsoft (in Redmond) at the time and everyone there seemed to have lots of computers at home – PC components are cheap over there and it’s easy to end up with a few,
As a result I found myself in need of a home server to give me centralised storage for sharing between these other PCs.

I already had a mail server in a Hush PC, but that had stayed behind in England (I accessed it remotely via ssh and SMTP/IMAP over TLS).
I liked the Hush PC, it was small, quiet, it happily ran headless, and most importantly it didn’t use much power.

My other PCs are all a bit hungry, but this home server was going to be on all the time and needed to be low power – so I quickly decided it was going to be a Mini-ITX Via motherboard (Intel Atoms were a long way off at this time, I make a lot of use of encryption so I’m not sure that I’d choose an Atom over Via’s padlock even now, I’d love to see some benchmarks).
And then I wanted a nice box for it.

I searched around for a nice existing box, something like an old radio or typewriter, but I couldn’t find anything.
Then Ali suggested a TARDIS.
It was just a simple throwaway comment, but it kept me busy for a while…

I would have liked to have been the first, but I knew I could be better than that one.
I also knew I wouldn’t be disappointed in the end result – because I knew exactly how well a Via board performed and for my purposes it was adequate.

I have been through a few routers in my time, but one of my favourites was the Linksys WRT54G3GV2 (with the HyperWRT Thibor firmware, I did some work to get Samba working with Vista and to fix bugs in UPnP, never got the latter sorter properly though).
That rather limited box made me want to have all my eggs in one basket, meaning a single power brick to a single device that would provide a home server, a decent number of gigabit Ethernet ports, router, and 802.11n wireless Ethernet.

The first step on construction was to make work out the dimensions and make some plans.
The new series TARDIS is rather more squat than the original TARDIS, this is a benefit for me so I decided to go with the new design.
I found a flat front picture that someone had made of the TARDIS and used that to base my plans on.
The plans themselves consisted of a pair of diagrams, done using Scribus, that showed the front and top of the TARDIS with dimensions.
I then printed these out 1:1 on an A3 inkjet printer.

The Basic Box

The Bare Box

The basic box is made up of three sheets of modelling plywood (about 2mm thick, but as it was bought in the US it’s probably some fraction of an inch); four inch square posts for the corners; a 26cm square block of 0.5″ MDF for the base.
The back panel at this stage is just a sheet of wire mesh, this gets cut and refined later.
The windows spaces will all be edged with balsa later, so they are just roughly cut holes at this point.

One thing that I did wrong is the interaction between the light boxes and the corner posts.
In my design the light boxes go ‘through’ the corner posts, the normal way to make a TARDIS is for the corner posts to be solid all the way up and then to have the light boxes cut around the posts.
I found that I couldn’t actually cut away the corner posts reliably enough, so I’ve actually got the corner posts ending below the light boxes – there is then a small corner post on top of that and an end cap (the same cross section as the main corner post) on top of that.
The result is that it looks like the corner post is cut away, but if you look closely you can see that the corner post caps have a gap below them at the height of the top of the light box.
Each corner post is clad in very thin ply to provide the routed lip at the edge of the corner post (you can’t see the gap below the corner post cap on the finished image above, but you can see it on the image here).

The main (inner) square of the roof is made up of the same wood as the corner posts (providing a very solid square frame, once I’d managed to cut it neatly enough, it took a few goes).
The outer ridge on the roof is ~6mm balsa glued onto the outside of the main square – hiding a substantial part of the main square and providing two equal height steps down from the roof itself.
The angled roof itself is thin ply, with some kind of modelling material (probably milliput, but I’m not sure I could get hold of the real thing) under the joins holding it together (the angle of the roof of a real TARDIS is always much less than you imagine).

The light boxes are very delicate, very thin ply for the four sides with very fragile balsa, sanded round, making the front edges – which stand proud of the ply on the inside to provide a lip for the POLICE BOX sign.
There are a couple of lengths of dowel inside the light box to provide more support.
At this point the POLICE BOX sign itself is just a print out on an inkjer printer.
It took some experimentation (later in the project) to get the signs right – the end result is done using Scribus (and a very good approximation to the right font) and printed on the inkjet printer, this is then backed with acetate (to hold the printout in place) and behind that is some black card to stop light leaking through the main black areas.

The chamfer around the base is sanded from balsa glued on top of the MDF base itself.
This provides a hidden join between the walls and the base for a much neater effect (also the MDF wasn’t the right height).

The Detailed Box

Box With Panel Details

The next step was painful, detailing the three main side panels and sorting out the lamp and lock.

Each side has three long vertical strips of balsa (narrow for the sides and long for the middle) and ten short horizontal strips of balsa (with narrower strips top and bottom).
Each of these strips has been sanded to create the camfer, and the horizontal strips have been sanded on the back to fit over the vertical strips.
After the panels had been put together they were glued into the corner posts and then the door frames (balsa strips, roughly 2mm cross section) were added (hiding the edges of the detailing strips).

The window frames are very fine balsa (~1mm x ~1mm cross section) glued as complete frames and then glued onto the back of the detailing balsa (making the front of the window frames the same depth as the door panels).

The telephone panel on the front side is edged with more fine balsa and has a very thin balsa panel behind it (making it raised relative to the main door panels).

The idea for the lock was stolen from another TARDIS builder – it’s the barrel of a very small padlock, cut out and put into a hole drilled in the front door (I think that even now it hasn’t been glued).

The lamp took a very long time to get right.
Starting at the top there is a 1″ diameter dished metal washer (complete with hole in the middle that I never did fill in).
Below that is a wooden washer/wheel about 33mm in diameter and originally about 10mm thick – I drilled a large hole through the middle of it and sanded the bottom flat.
Hanging down from the wooden top are four nails – these are fixed through the wooden top (with their heads hidden by the metal washer) but are loose in the wooden block at the base so the central part can be accessed.
The wire frame came from offcuts of the back panel (though that was diamond shaped and needed stretching to make square) and the glass is a plastic tube (it took me a long time to find one that was the right size and I don’t remember now where I found it – I do have a collection of test tubes and plastic pots now though:)).
The lamp base is a just a block of MDF which sits on two support struts glued across the whole in the top of the angled roof (so that a lamp from below can be stuck into it).

Painting

Finding the right paint was a total nightmare.

Merchandise (printed media) related to the new series always tends to have a distincly purple tint to the box, but whenever I tried paint that colour on my tests it looked very wrong.
My conclusion was that it is more important for a model to look right than to be right – I don’t actually know what colour the TARDIS props are, but my TARDIS looks the right colour as seen on the TV (and if you disagree based on these pictures I’ll blame the colour reproduction of the images ).

Paint Test

There were quite a few tests to find the right colours and approach.

The Final Paint Job

In the end it got a white undercoat, then two coats of blue (I’m afraid I can’t tell you what blue it was, it came from Home Depot) and a wash of black – with sanding in between each coat.
The black wash was vital, without it the box was both lifeless and too bright, when that wash went on it became a lovely battered old Police Box.

The telephone sign was printed from one found on the Internet somewhere.

The window panes themselves are cut from a plastic stationary-type wallet (a cheap thing for keeping your papers in). There are just three sheets cut out and stuck behind the three front & sides pairs of windows.

I think the light behind this image was just a torch sitting in the box.

That’s about it for the outside, the next stage was to prepare the insides.

The Back Panel

As I said before, the back panel began as a sheet of wire mesh.
This was them fitted with the same kind of detail as the other three sides, but with cutaways for access to the various ports.

The Back Panel

The Empty Box

On the back panel there are two holes for the two six-way CAT-6 patch panels; one large hole for the back panel of the mini-ITX motherboard; a large round hole for the power button; and a small round hole for the power lead.

Interior of Back Panel, With Fitments

Back Panel, With Fitments

The patch panel fittings were taken from a 12 port Cat 6 patch panel bought from Fry’s. The cable is solid core Cat 6 cable from a local cabling company in Redmond – they gave it to me for free because I only wanted about 15′ of it.
I have to be honest and say that I don’t know whether the motherboard back plane is still held on with insulating tape!

The Guts

Internal Tower, Rear View

The base of the computer is a Lian Li drive bay bought for another case and never used – painted black to make it less noticeable behind the grills.

Coming up from the drive bay are four threaded rods, with plastic tubes being used as spacers. The threaded rods hold up, in turn, the motherboard and the table – upon which the Netgear gigabit Ethernet switch and DLink 802.11n router sit.

Stuffed in by the side of the drives is the DC-DC power supply module (it was very awkward to get that to fit – if you’re building a custom Mini-ITX case remember to take into account both the DC-DC module and the cabling from it.

The Mini-ITX board I used has an IDE port (connected to a compact flash boot drive); and a couple of SATA ports (one of which is used to connect the Samsung 500GB physical disc).

Internal Tower, Front View

This image shows the table clearly, with holes cut for ventilation and a cutaway to allow space for the back of the patch panel.
The image also shows the single 12cm fan that draws air in at the bottom of the tower (and there is nowhere for it to go but up and out the top).

Preproduction Power Solution

This image shows the measures that were necessary to get the internal computer up and running before I’d sorted out the power supply.

Also shown here is the light strip that provides illumination behind the light boxes (and spills light through the main windows too), and the sounder that never made it into the finished thing (a server that sits silently in the corner but occasionally makes dematerialisation noises isn’t really that practical).

Stuffing It All In

Stuffing It All In

The back panel has to be put in place with the computer, here you can see that the Netgear is in situ, and both the Netgear and the DLink are wired up to each other, the patch panel and the computer.
It’s a very tight squeeze – the DLink just manages to sit below the height of the window (otherwise it would be visible) and persuading the solid core cables from the patch panel to fit is something of an acquired skill.

Also showing on this picture is the lid, with a long black cable (coming from a fan header on the PC board) snaking out to it.
The lid is a simple panel that rests on the light boxes and holds the light strip behind the light boxes. Without the lid there would be light leaking underneath the roof.

The image also shows that the rear light box is loose (the router is sitting where it should be). That light box has to be removable in order to get the back panel out, so it’s just held in place by the weight of the lid and the roof.

The Software

The Finished TARDIS

For me, the only operating system to run on a Via Mini-ITX system is Gentoo Linux. This is simply because everything is compiled specifically for the CPU and it’s able to take advantage of things like Via Padlock (though that’s not the easiest thing to get up and running).

Since the start I’ve run exim for my email; samba file sharing; and an apache web server (for my own use only). I use the courier IMAP server (sometimes available externally, but these days I tend to lock it down for internal use only).

SSH has always been key to my use of the TARDIS, enabling me to have access to it whereever I may be (on an obscure port and usually locked down to known external IP ranges).

Sometimes I use rtorrent (with dtach), though not as much now I’m back in England and the television is better!

The fan is controlled via lm_sensors, and you can hear it spin up and down during the day (and more so at night when there is nothing else to drown it out – the TARDIS isn’t silent, but it is quiet).
The disc is also set to spin down when idle, but I don’t think it gets much opportunity to actually do so.

And Now

The TARDIS Today

And here it is today (1 November 2009), 2 1/2 years later and 8000 miles away from where it began, with a few nicks and scratches to show for its life.

The TARDIS is still my main home server, now with three or four PC clients and whatever Macs Ali is using.

In the US I had a cable modem, with a nice Cat 5 plug straight into my router, back in dear old Blighty I’m on ADSL, which is why there is that nasty ADSL modem visible in the picture.
There’s no space to fit the modem inside, there aren’t any decent 802.11n/gigabit/ADSL routers on the market, and anyway I’d need to cut a new hole in the back to account for the RJ11 connector.

It sits in the window and at night the glow seen outside is beautiful, but then I’m biased, the neighbours probably think I’m nuts.