Turning a Networking Switch into a Server

[Scheer]

This weekend I didn't feel like doing any house or shop work and wanted a stupid project to kill some time... so I decided to cram a laptop into an old networking switch. I didn't detail the process much, but did snap a few pictures along the way.

 

The laptop had been routinely dropped, most recently shattering the screen, and was so broken up that replacing the screen wasn't worth it as about every plastic piece on it was cracked. Fairly decent spec'd with a i5-3210m and 4GB of RAM I figured it was worth while to keep around rather than just throwing away, but I couldn't think of anything to actually do with it... Then at Christmas one of my uncles who works for a telecom provider brought me an old 10/100 24 port managed switch that was the perfect sized 1U enclosure to fit the laptop into.

 

The switch was gutted, saving only the fans in case I need some cooling for the laptop, and I removed the C14 plug from the power supply so that I could solder the laptop power adapter to it. The laptop was then torn apart so that I could completely remove the display, and tap onto the power button for a front mounted power button.

 

 

It was a pretty tight fit, so I had to cut away at the molding on the USB and VGA extensions so that they could be bent out of the way in order to fit the top of the enclosure on. A Cat6 Keystone was used for the ethernet extension.

 

 

A bit of 3M vinyl on the front to cover up the holes where all of the switches ports were to clean up the appearance.

 

 

And voila, a spare server for something... I'm starting to run out of room in the rack 

 

[King_Tuna]

What an unnecessary project btw why did you removed laptop screen? U could disable lid reactions on windows. (like falling sleep mode)

[Mayaa]

What a unnecessary project btw why did you removed laptop screen? U could disable lid reactions on windows. (like falling sleep mode)

 

It was broken anyway, so probably just to make it look more neat, or take up less space.

And hey, he just wanted something stupid to burn time on so i think he did a good job

[Scheer]

What an unnecessary project btw why did you removed laptop screen? U could disable lid reactions on windows. (like falling sleep mode)

 

The plastic was broken up where the hinges attached, so the screen was only held on by the display cable, figured I would just get it out of the way. The backlight was still intact and I wanted that for another project as well.