The mini home server IBM never made

[zero cool]

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Well, this project is really mostly done on the hardware and software side, but it'll be an ongoing thing for a while, so I figured I would at least document it some.
I wrote about the machine and ideas in this thread https://bb.deadnet.se/viewtopic.php?t=109 previously.
It's an IBM SurePOS 300 point-of-sale computer base unit from 2009. I've found documents connected with it from all the way back in 2004 however, so it feels very fitting for a small home server-appliance-thing from around 2004-2005, where I'm placing this fictional but functional product.

The system was found on an auction for about $40, in fully functional stock form with the original install (for which the hard drive has since died completely and wont spin(?!))
It's *some* (This IBM does not report is, just like the forum server) Intel Celeron-M 1GHz single-thread CPU, its maximum 2GB of RAM, and now a 250GB Samsung SSD.

Here's the extremely not exciting SSD mod. It's just an old 850 Evo from 2014 that I had laying about.

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The fan was replaceed with a 60mm Noctua one. I never took a picture of this, but I can assure you it's suitably ghetto. The stock fan is of the ever so common (never seen one before in my life) 50mm size.. And a noisy little bastard at that! So I did what any self respecting geek would do and threw a too big fan in its place, attached with one screw and then wedged in between the case and the motherboard. It just so happened to fit in there perfectly.
It turned out to still be too noisy with the Noctua on full speed, and caused a lot of turbulence-type noises. I went to try different so called 'low noise adapters' for computer fans, which are just resistors in a somewhat fancy packaging. These either didn't make it quiet enough, or made the fan so slow it instead caused the system to run too warm for my liking. (The PSU fan is responsible for all system cooling in this thing)

Well, me being me.. Electronics nutter and all. I made my own in-line speed controller. It's really very simple.
I used the ever so common 7805 5V voltage regulator. There is a trick you can pull with these 78-series regulators, in that, if you add a resistor, or potentiometer on series with the regulator ground pin, you can raise the output voltage. I used this feature(?) to make a speed controller that gives me 5-12V adjustable output voltage.
This only requires the regulator, a little potentiometer and a couple of capacitors.

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Soldered up on a little piece of strip-board with the ends of a fan extension cable on each side of the board.

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Since I am one of the fancier ghetto kind when it comes to getting stuff done quickly because I'm done with it, I wrapped the board in some electrical tape and installed it in the system. lol. It works great!

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That's it on the hardware side at the moment. I still need to find something fun to do with the six serial ports on the back. I'm also pondering adding a USB attached storage drive to use for file sharing. Not decided on that one yet though. Oh yeah! there's also a USB soundcard plugged in, because the onboard is some weird ass device that's not really supported in Linux, of course..

I'll briefly mention some bits of the web interface I've made. It's heavily inspired by the IBM WebSphere interface, in terms of styling.
It's your basic table-driven early 2000s pile of glorious shit with all the shortcomings that provides.
It's got some basic system monitoring and management. All the interactive elements are backed by cgi scripts that execute system commands. This is only a local system, so I also put the same amount of care into security as on a early 2000s network appliance. Keeping with the theme here!

The main page has a list of the running services, and brief system monitoring. More extensive monitoring can be found on the 'Statistics' page.

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There is a page for viewing logs as well. The update mechanism is a wonderful bodge of cgi and bash scripts that slurp up and copy files to the correct directory, to be displayed in the frame on the page.

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That USB soundcard I mentioned above? Yeah, it's for internet radio playback. I'm running MOC Player on the system, outputting the audio to the USB soundcard and a bluetooth audio transmitter that's paired with a little bluetooth speaker I can carry around at home. It's a pretty slick solution. I just power the speaker on, it connects, and I have music playing right away.
To manage this without SSH'ing into the box I have added a radio page as well. This has a cgi-powered web front-end for MOC. The scripts run console commands to tickle MOC in the balls properly.

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I also made a tiny control page for my HP iPaq to control the radio via that if I like.

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That's about all I feel like writing about it for the moment, lol. This is a work in progress and I doubt it'll ever be done-done. But for now I'm quite happy with where it stands.