In January of 2014, I built a new, proper firewall, because all the previous franken-machines I used before had hard-drive issues, and I really needed a stable development server.

This machine is still going today, 10 years later, and aside from the fact that it’s limited to 16Gb of DDR3 RAM, it’s still a core part of my home lab.

But the time came to change it from it’s home-made angle-iron “spider” platform to something a bit more modern, and dust-proof.

The new living space for “spider”

And what it used to be mounted on, steampunk style.

It was pretty challenging to find a chassis that accomodates a horizontally mounted mini-ITX board, but Lian-Li came through. My big concern was the massive Zalmann heat pipe that I had installed initially, because I wanted the system as quiet as possible, but it fit perfectly into the Lian-Li PC-QR36W I acquired.

I can’t believe this machine has served me so well for 10 years, and it’s still not bad in terms of performance.