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alex!
@atctwo.net
61 followers 330 following 49 posts
she/her · 🏳️‍⚧️ & (🇬🇧 || 🇮🇪) · belfast, NI · posting about my silly little projects, photography, and things i find interesting · atctwo.net
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atctwo.net
i don't need sleep, i need to make fun animations in OpenSCAD
October 22, 2025 at 1:25 AM
atctwo.net
snilicone (silicone snail)
a small snail cast from pure silicone, chilling in the leaves of a small fake eucalyptus plant. in the background are the tops of several real plants, against a wooden fence
October 17, 2025 at 1:05 PM
atctwo.net
i've been playing with tiling window managers for linux recently. i haven't really done much custom theming but i made some modifications to the "Spotlight Dark" theme for rofi by Newman Sanchez, and i really like how it looks!
an application launcher dialog on top of a pretty desktop wallpaper. the wallpaper features art of a tree in front of a small coastal village. at the top of the application launcher is a search box - the search prompt is a cat icon followed by "nya". below this are a row of five buttons representing different launcher tabs - in order, these are applications, visual studio code history, run command, window list, and calculator. the rest of the dialog contains a list of available applications, along with their application icons.
September 30, 2025 at 9:02 PM
atctwo.net
my cat bot had a fun time at my local battlebots meetup last night!
September 4, 2025 at 5:55 PM
atctwo.net
these are cat-shaped battlebots i made for my local battlebots competition!!! so far in testing, they seem to be able to tank damage pretty well, mostly due to their flexible TPU plating.

so i redesigned it a little so that the whole thing was made from TPU. now its soft and squishy!
picture of the new version of the robot, with a pink lid and a black chassis, and a pink spinner weapon. the chassis has curved sides so it can't get stuck on its side the new design sitting on top of the old design. you can see the difference in shape of the chassis given the new design has curved sides. the old design looks a lot more blocky. other than that, both robots look mostly the same top-down view of the two bots, facing opposite directions. the new one is on the left, pink side facing up, and the old one on the right has its blue side facing up. if you look closely at the old design, you can see the seam between the outer TPU shell and the inner PETG chassis. the new design has no such seam
August 5, 2025 at 9:17 PM
atctwo.net
two of them
two robots shaped like a cat head, sitting on a mesh table. they both have two wheels as eyes and a pink spinner blade as a tongue. both are made of a black chassis with the left one having a blue lid and the right one with a pink lid. the lids have lines on them in the style of whiskers. they are very cute
August 5, 2025 at 9:10 PM
atctwo.net
didn't get much done today but at least I found One East Caribbean Dollar!
One East Caribbean Dollar. A small silver coin sitting on a black table. There's an illustration of a sailboat on the coin, above which lies text reading "East Caribbean States 2012"
August 5, 2025 at 3:53 PM
atctwo.net
i think that's it for now! that's most of the interesting things about this server that i wanted to talk about. if i find anything else interesting i'll add them to this thread later but for now i need to put all of this back together lol
picture of all the parts i took out of the server, all laid out on a wooden table. the open server is sitting in the top right. the parts surrounding it are: one power supply module, the motherboard and its IO shield, the RAID card, the network card, the two sticks of RAM, the CPU and its cooler, a few SATA cables, the two internal harddrives, one of the hotswappable fans, the slim drive top cover, and the internal drive mount panel. my screwdriver set is also sitting in the lower right
July 11, 2025 at 2:19 PM
atctwo.net
here's the front panel IO board. it's got leds for disk activity, warnings, lan activity, buttons for reset and mute and power, and two USB 2.0 ports. it's got a 6-way DIP switch in the middle to control the chassis fans
a green PCB mounted to the top of the chassis, with many side-mount buttons and LEDs, two USB connectors, and a series of 2.54mm pitch headers for connecting to the server motherboard. there is a black chip in the middle beside a buzzer, and a blue DIP switch to the left
July 11, 2025 at 2:10 PM
atctwo.net
taking the rest of the top panel off, above the drive bays are two bays for slim drives. i think one's intended for an optical drive and the other for a floppy drive! which i would absolutely install if i had one.

also, in the middle is the front IO board
picture of the top of the server with the top panel removed. it's split into two sections; the left one has a small floppy drive adapter board in it labeled JM215A VER:1.0, while the right section is empty. The middle section has a small green board toward the front of the chassis, which will be shown in more detail in the next post.
July 11, 2025 at 2:10 PM
atctwo.net
here's the best picture of the SAS backplane i could get without taking the fan panel out. there are four mini SAS HD connectors (each carry signals for four of the drive bays), and four molex power connectors plugged into the PSU backplane
picture of the left half of the sas backplane. on the left are four molex connectors plugged into the backplane. there are holes in the PCB to allow air to flow through the drives. there are two connectors at the top of the board with wires running to underneath a metal panel picture of the right half of the sas backplane. on the right are four mini SAS HD connectors (SFF-8087) plugged into the backplane. there are a few thick cables running from the bottom of the chassis to the top, obscuring part of the image.
July 11, 2025 at 2:10 PM
atctwo.net
having lunch
a ham and cheese bread roll on a plate sitting in top of the server
July 11, 2025 at 1:47 PM
atctwo.net
next are the fans. these are 80mm fans which are housed in these caddy thingies, which allow them to be hotswapped! i will probably replace them with noctua fans at some point but they're 32mm deep which i don't think noctua make?
picture of the fan caddy. it's made of blue plastic and has holes in the back for air to flow. the fan cable comes out the top and down to the centre of the back, where the connector is held pointing downwards picture of the front of the fan caddy, showing the fan itself. it's a FFB0812EHE by Delta Electronics
July 11, 2025 at 1:20 PM
atctwo.net
the three PSUs mount into a backplane which provides several common power connectors: a 24 pin atx, a 4 pin CPU power, an 8 pin pcie power connector, and a few 4 pin molex con connectors.

it's not modular but it's really cool that it "combines" the three PSUs into one set of common cables!
picture of the inside of the chassis. at the back there is a large shiny box which houses the power supplies. coming out of it are several bundles of cables, which each terminate in different ATX-standard power connectors
July 11, 2025 at 1:11 PM
atctwo.net
I think I'm done with the computer, so on to the chassis! it came with three 380W power supplies in really good condition. they're YM-7381C supplies and I'm really glad it came with them because the cost of 3 of these is more than what I paid for the whole server...
picture of the three power supplies mounted into the back of the chassis. they each have a C14 power socket, a small fan, and a steel handle for pulling them out of the server. the top of a power supply. its very long, and you can sees the fan and handle at the left of the supply. there's a white label on top, showing product info, rail voltages, and safety info
July 11, 2025 at 1:11 PM
atctwo.net
it came with this windows COA for Windows Unified Data Store Server 2003, an obscure Server 2003 variant that was only released to Dell (according to this archive.org item: archive.org/details/WUDS...).

anyway here's a product key for windows unified data store server 2003!
a Microsoft certificate of authority for "Win Unified DataStorSvr2003 x64 1-4 CPU Std". The product key is KT2JM-K37JG-YMV9M-RWT7M-XWP6J"
July 11, 2025 at 12:56 PM
atctwo.net
there aren't any drives in the front bays, but there are two Fujitsu MHY2080BH 80GB (?) SATA drives. I'm guessing they're RAIDed but I'll check what's on them later.
two identical drives attached to the metal plate that was attached to the top of the chassis. they are 2.5" drives, and have a large white label almost covering the metal lid of the drive. the label has lots of writing (mostly product codes in regulatory info) and a large barcode in the middle
July 11, 2025 at 12:46 PM
atctwo.net
the CPU is an Intel Core 2 Duo E6420, which doesn't seem do be intended for server use.
close up of the CPU. its a small green square with a large metal lid attached to it. the lid is inscribed with the CPU's model number but it's difficult to make out
July 11, 2025 at 12:28 PM
atctwo.net
the motherboard has been freed!

it's a Tyan Toledo I965r S5180, which does seem to be designed for use in servers.

here's a review from phoronix: www.phoronix.com/review/668
a top-down picture of the motherboard from inside the chassis. all the expansion cards and ram have been removed, but the heatsinks are still attached close up of the silkscreen markings on the board showing the model number, and the text "Designed in the USA, Tested to comply with FCC standard"
July 11, 2025 at 12:28 PM
atctwo.net
next is this ARC1280ML pcie sata-II raid controller. it uses mini SAS connectors but I think it only supports the SATA-II protocol.

so I'm probably going to get a much more modern SAS HBA at a later point

(also this thing uses a ddr2 stick for cache!)
a larger green board. it also has gold edge connectors at the bottom but they're a lot denser than the last card. there's a huge black heatsink to the left, and a few black chips scattered around. there are four mini SAS connectors on the right edge, a RJ45 connector on the left edge, and a DDR2 ram slot at the top.
July 11, 2025 at 12:03 PM
atctwo.net
here are the two expansion cards the server came with. this is an Intel pro/1000 mt dual port (PWLA8492MT), which is a 1Gbit PCI (not pcie) network card.
a green PCI expansion card, with a row of gold edge connectors at the bottom edge. there are two Ethernet jacks on the left side, and several black chips dotted across the board.
July 11, 2025 at 12:03 PM
atctwo.net
I got this on ebay, mostly for the chassis, but the listing was actually for a whole server!

there's a core 2 duo board with 2GB DDR2 RAM, so I guess it's not a very useful server these days. but I bought it for the chassis, which is perfect! I'm going to look at this board anyway (for fun)!
top-down view of the inside of the server. the left half is where the motherboard and other computer parts live, which are obscured by a large metal panel. a shiny box can be seen at the top of the left half; this is the power supply enclosure. in the middle of the chassis is a metal divider. to the right are four blue boxes; these are hotswappable 80mm fans. on the right of the chassis is a large metal panel, which the drives live under. close-up of the motherboard. it's a green board. of note on the board are a small metal heatsink (for the chipset), and a larger round heatsink with a fan attached (for the CPU). two green RAM sticks are inserted, and two expansion cards are inserted. there are wires grouped using cable ties going all over the inside of the case.
July 11, 2025 at 12:03 PM
atctwo.net
I'm mostly interested in using this chassis for its 16 SAS drive bays, so I can (finally) add storage to my server.
closer image of the front panel. there are 16 drive slots, 10 have drive caddies in them while the other 6 are empty. at the top are 2 USB ports, some status LEDs, and the power switch. the left and right sides of the panel have handles, and under the left panel is a badge saying "Westek Technologies"
July 11, 2025 at 12:03 PM
atctwo.net
I made an impulse buy...
this is a 3U server (chassis)! I got it to upgrade my current server into this new chassis. there's a lot of interesting stuff in here so I'm going to make a wee thread!
a 3U server on a wooden table. its a long steel box with a black front panel that has 16 drive bays (6 are empty). a rail is attached to the side and there's a bag of screws taped on top
July 11, 2025 at 12:03 PM
atctwo.net
i made a cat-themed robot friend that bites and pushes things off tables
June 3, 2025 at 10:19 PM