Gotta start with a clean workspace - it will get cluttered soon enough:

Okay, we need to open up the case. We start with the left side (looking at the case). It has two screws you can take off by hand:

Note that you don't want to pull the clear plastic coating off just yet. We want to prevent scratches as long as possible to the finish. We also want to collect all manuals, CDs, and cables in one place. We do not want to go looking for them later:

We also need to collect screws as we take them off:

Do you really need to do these two things? No. But it saves on tracking them down later. Been there, done that, lost a couple of hours.

Okay, how does it look inside:

First off, you can see the PSU will go in the bottom and that there are covers to keep the lower chamber apart from the upper one. This is to help in heat management. It looks clean and you can see that the drive cages are in place. Also, if you've had an earlier version of the P180, you might notice right away that the video card hood vent system is gone.

Here is a close-up of the PSU cage, it is the first thing we are going to install. The case manual says to first install the motherboard, but the PSU is by far the heaviest and hardest thing to install. So, in it goes.

If we look at the 3.5" hard drive cage, we see we have a box inside the case:

Okay, again your fingers can get the cage out:

And we open it up to find the rails, vent cover, and screws:

We need to get the other side off in order to pull out the PSU cage. We also need a screwdriver. When it is out:

We then need to unpack the PSU:

Notice the modular cables in the bag. And remember foreshadowing is a sign of fine journalism. Anyway, we put the cage over it and do not worry too much about aligning it right now. We slip it back in the case:

We then push the cage until we can get one screw on. We don't want to tighten it, we need the play to get the others on. You can see the other hole is not aligned up just yet. No need to worry.

We push and pull the rest of the cage until we have all of the screws on. Then we start tightening them. At the end, we see the PSU is aligned pretty much at the back:

The case manual said to screw it in at the back as well with the supplied screws:

Well, I don't like them - they feel too small. It turns out the PSU has some screws, so we swap them out.

These screws bit as they went in. We need the back screws to get the PSU from sliding. The cage feels tight right now, but if the side screws loosen, it could move. Also, one of the reviews on the Seastone M12 stated that it was 1mm larger than normal PSUs. The thing went in smoothly. There were no problems related to size with the P180b.

But I know you are waiting for the shoe to drop. Well, I never attached the modular cables:

It looks tight and I looked screwed. I could pull the whole thing off and risk stripping something. But that black piece of plastic in front of the PSU is a 120mm cage fan. You know what, it can come off. Also, I don't yet know what cables I need to add. And I might have to add more in the future. The PSU can not be removable in the future.

If we look at the other side of the lower cage, we can see that the middle fan is not screwed in. It is held in place by some tabs:

Now the manual says nothing at all about how to remove this fan. I didn't want to break it. It turns out that if you push down on the plastic strip in the first picture and push from the inside of the second picture, it pops right out:

You can then see that we have plenty of room to add cables. Note that I don't think this will be as easy to do once all of the cables have been added. I want to get this right next time.

As a piece of administrivia, the process of taking pictures (Kodak EasyShare Z740) and blogging during the install is easily doubling the process. Normally I would have the motherboard, CPU, and memory in by now.

Also, as much as I like the Antec P180s, they do not have a internal PC speaker. I found this out the hard way on my last build when the system would not POST. I ended up getting a PCI Post Boot card to display what went wrong. I don't want to use it this time, but I will show some examples of how to use it.

So the motherboard got here safely:

Before I dove into getting the computer up and running, I wanted to explore getting the USB enclosure outfitted. Remember, I bought this model because it was going to support 12mm 2.5" Notebook drives. And I wanted to get in the proper frame of mind of working and blogging while things were fresh.

Okay, what does the enclosure look like straight out of the box?

And if we open it up, we see a printed circuit board. Which tells me this enclosure is pretty old. Look at it:

Versus the insides of the one which was too small:

Bigger normally means older. Anyway, you can also see the drive in the above picture. We slide it into the card, it is a tight fit but it will pop in:

Once slipped in, it is in snugly:

You flip this one over and you find that you can screw it on. You can notice also that the circuit board is starting to pick up oils from my palms.

Okay, don't tighten any of the scres until you have them all in. One didn't ever go down all of the way, but that should be okay. By the time I did this part, I stopped using their supplied screw driver. By the way, they don't use it either in the manual.

And now we just slide it back in the enclosure, right? Nope - it didn't fit back in. I'll bet it would take 11.5mm drives. But not this Travelstar. Okay, I'm actually happy enough with the mounting on the circuit board. The drive isn't going anywhere and I'm never going to reuse the enclosure. By the way, this product would suck if that was your intent. Anyway, here it is just a bit too big:

So here it is on one of the NSLU2 machines, LED bright and you can hear the drive head chunking along.

But no disk is showing up on the system. I connect it to my USB hub - still no luck. LED is bright, but no chunking. Okay, I try it on the front of the adept. Now I get the chunking. My guess is that it isn't drawing enough power via the USB connection. I put the second vampire connection on and still no luck. This has gone from quick and easy to slow and painful. I'm going to drop working on it for right now.

Okay, I wanted to show the state of the Antec P180B box after it was dropped off into my arms by UPS:

I had seen the hole circled in red and I somehow missed the one in green. I don't know how! Anyway, NewEgg.com never opened this unit and UPS should have caught any problems before they accepted shipment. Now, to open the box, I ran a razor over the top tape. I used this thing my mother-in-law got me at Xmas:

If I drop it, it doesn't take a chunk out of my foot. You can use the blue lever to pop out a tiny blade. You typically use this to start a hole. Then you insert the remaining part and go arround the edge of the container. It is really made for those plastic shells you get most consumer electronics in. I love it since my 10 year old son can use it to open them himself.

Once it was opened, I flipped the box over. The case weighs 37 lbs and I wasn't going to pull it out. Here you can see the box starting to be pulled off. You can kinda get a taste of the internal packaging - the styrofoam and cardboard is visible. I don't remember if the case I got last year was this well protected. And you get the full effect once the outer layer is taken off.

When the ends are removed, you can see a protective cardboard insert inside them. I don't know that styrofoam scratches and there is a plastic film over the case. But anyway, there is an inner cardboard layer to protect the case.

When all of the cardboarding is removed, you can see the final plastic film layer on the case:

Finally, I'm still waiting on the motherboard (it got in at 4:42 AM last night and went out for delivery at 5:03 AM). Before I can start the build, I'll need a clean work surface:

That won't take too long. Of interest is the bamboo plant, which I got last Xmas. It still lives. And also you can see the 3.5" internal cage with the 4 250G SATA drives already waiting to go into the case. These are from wont, which is housed in a silver P180. I really liked this case when I put it together last year. I'm hoping the drive enclosure will just slip right in.

My other plan is to slap a 200G ATA/133 drive in as the root paritition. I want to keep the SATA drives for zfs and I don't want my WinXP partition to be on them. The Gigabyte MB doesn't support ATA/133, but I'll burn one of my PCI slots and throw in a controller. Or I'll go see what type of specials I can get on ATA/100 drives locally. No biggie either way.

I was reading some web comics, strictly on my own time of course, and I noticed that they all had little cast pages - to help you keep them straight. Well, here is my cast page for my boxes.

mrx

This is my current desktop machine:

Right off the bat you see that it doesn't like to wear much. The graphics card is also fanless - to reduce the noise pollution. It doesn't matter much, the CPU fan-oid and the PSU fan are pretty loud. You can see that it doesn't have a DVD drive, in a large part that is so the 3.5" HD can be in a cooler. Also, sometimes an OS will not boot from the USB DVD drive, so you can see the ribbon cable waiting to hook up a DVD drive.

Finally, mrx will pretty much run whatever OS is needed. The primary partition is Win XP, but a FreeBSD 6.0 is also in place. Pretty soon now mrx will forget all about Win XP and move onto either Nevada (Solaris 11) or some OpenSolaris variant.

adept

This is my current web/dns/mail server:

Until recently, it also sat on my desktop. I used it as my unix outlet until I started working at Sun. Then I moved on to Solaris. Again, the system hasn't had a skin for years. But unlike mrx, a DVD drive is attached. The cooler I had for it had a loud set of fans. They had to go!

Once I get mrx switched to OpenSolaris, I'll also use it to replace adept's duties. It is pretty easy to get the same web and dns services up and running. I'm not so happy with getting sendmail configured on OpenSolaris. I'll also need to get mail filtering set up. Once that is done, adept will be free to be a test machine for new installations of OpenSolaris. It can also test new projects I am working on.

ultralord, sandman, and warlock

ultralord is an Ultra 10 that I got off of EBay. I added a new DVD drive and maxed out the memory. I might have also added another hard drive. Yes, I did do that as well. I use it to test sparc based installs and simple NFS interactions.

sandman is an Ultra 5 that I got out of a lab closing. I added a new DVD drive to it. This machine allows me to test sparc based server and client interactions.

warlock is my work supplied machine. It is a w2100z and sounds like a Harrier landing. At least I can't imagine a Harrier sounding too much louder. I've updated the bios, but it is still pretty loud. By the way, you can find out the bios level pretty easily:

# prtdiag
System Configuration: Sun Microsystems   W1100z/2100z
BIOS Configuration: Sun Microsystems R01-B5 S1 09/29/2006

I use it to VPN into Sun and then I run a Sun Ray 1G on my desk to do my job. This setup is pretty fast and quiet in my office.

The 3 servers are sitting on top of a 1/2 telco rack kit. I got it to house a NetApp F760 and shelf, but it was not deep enough to house them. Plus, they beat the w2100z in terms of noise pollution. These servers sit in a closet off of my office. I have a portmaster (another lab scavange system) to handle the consoles. It is named darkness:

You can see I just pile stuff on top of it. By the way, it is really quiet! You can see the little 5 port Netgear GigE switch/hub on top as well. It is connected into my office via the patch panel:

You can see the two port panel down at the bottom. One port serves as my primary network subnet. The other can either be a second subnet or allow me to connect a console port in my office to darkness. You can also see a bathroom ceiling fan we mounted on the wall. The closet is adjacent to the attic, so I use the fan to get air moving through the closet. Yes, in the summer it is warm air, but I want to make sure that there is a flow of air. I normally leave the closet open.

Telco tower

I keep all of my networking hub next to the patch panel in my office. Hmm, you can see the patch panel down at the bottom and you can see the tower of fun here:

Okay, the cable modem is on the top shelf. Under the gorilla, there is a Netscreen 10 that I used to use as my firewall. On top of it is the Cisco 831 I use whenever I need to connect my Sun Ray to the Sun network. (Which I only have to do with certain legacy apps.)

On the next shelf, you can see the 8 port 10/100 Netgear switch and my Belkin wireless router. Hmm, I typically call the last box I can manage janus. At one point that was the Netscreen 10, but now it is the Belkin. The Netscreen had some better firewall features, but I need the Belkin for the SR@Home stuff. (Sun Ray at home). I've tried to replace it with some Netgear and Linksys wireless routers, but either they don't do the SR@Home or their firewall feature set is too lame.

By the way, the walls are a sand color, but I'd say they look mustardy. The baseboards are purple, the same color as the shelves. They were just watered down. The ceiling is the same color as the baseboards. My wife gives me all of the credit for my office.

The Monster

I won't post my son's name up here. I call him the Monster. It has nothing to do with him, just the nickname I picked. It happens to be one I never call him.

I like this shot because it is the first honest smile from him ever captured on film. This was from shortly before Christmas - he is with his brand new cousin.

New members

I need to get snaps of The Monster's Mega-Monkey Hit, which I call wont. I also need to get one of my wife's machine, my laptop, and the new box being built. Check back later for the new cast members.