Case In Point
TL;DR — A short post about the recent site outage and the new fan I acquired for the server.
2 minutes
Last Sunday evening, quite out of the blue, the web server that hosts this site started making a horrible whining noise. A quick finger-check determined it was the fan making the noise. I tried to clean the unit (and the Pi4 beneath it) with some compressed air, but alas, the damage to the fan had been done.
![Diagonal view of the webserver as it originally was](/media/images/2fc5bcd2ec302416982f9f6d0a3312cfcf2e86f93d0015156ff0614356d413c4.jpg)
![Top view of the webserver as it originally was](/media/images/f55168710441d47cc0148a1c1bef48b702aa43d0f5e32ed0a0545200fd3b3d7a.jpg)
![Bottom view of the webserver as it originally was](/media/images/465407dfbd54e8173dbb278c74af603f00e1e6071d840ea58221d56ee07be0ad.jpg)
Thanks to the magical delivery gnomes, a replacement case arrived the very next day (well, technically it was the following night, which was unfortunately about 2 hours too late for Monday Night’s session of Planar Vagabond, but close enough). So, Tuesday morning, I started swapping the old case for the new one, and 15 minutes later, it was back online.
After some looking around, I went with a “ICE Tower Cooler” by GeeekPi. It was relatively inexpensive, easy enough to put together, and the LED in the fan adds a distinctive, #cyberpunk vibe to the machine (particularly compared to the somewhat professional-but-pedestrian original case).
![Vertically diagonal view of the webserver in its new case](/media/images/c2c12cc0458047540142092680a14f6208cae651c2e1a4e263ad9e642dd88cf9.jpg)
![Horizontally diagonal view of the webserver in its new case](/media/images/70ff6cbadd6715f7453bfa041d05b5c3cd3c1fb407940343c9e68b0b829881c5.jpg)
![Rear-view of the webserver in its new case](/media/images/373599bf2e8ba836007e274e07131da5a54a23c3a1bfd3ebca6a75cccb676008.jpg)