Founder of PC-BSD Houses Servers in Own Yard Part 1

Kris Moore has done it again. The founder and lead developer of PC-BSD has brazenly stepped out into the vast wilderness (limited to the confines of his backyard) and come back inspired with brilliant ideas.

Over the span of one and a half weeks, Kris undertook a project to completely transform the outdoor shed behind his house into a server room. His goal was to construct a room full of servers, dedicated to hosting numerous different systems for all his work and personal needs.

Here’s a detailed account of the process, in Kris’ own words:

“Anybody who has been around a server room can tell you: they are noisy and generate a lot of heat. So what is a person to do when they want to run several servers at a specific location, but do not want the noise and heat in their living space? In my case, we happened to have a nice shed/outbuilding in the back yard that would do nicely. By a stroke of luck, I already had ethernet run out to the building when we put in electricity some years ago.” (My general rule of thumb is anytime you run a power line, you may as well do ethernet at the same time)



“Our outbuilding is a pretty good size, so I decided to partition it off, and create a small 5′ x 11′ room which will have plenty of space for a server rack and several desktop systems. I will be putting in a thermostat and air-conditioning system in the room to keep the systems at a comfortable temperature at all times, and the smaller space gives us less total square-footage that needs to be actively cooled.”



“Here, I’ve begun to construct the frame and doorway. I’ve added a roof to the room, so that we can have an extra layer of separation between the outbuilding roof and the server room ceiling. Plus this way, we don’t block the vent above.”



“Now I’ve started to add drywall and insulation to the room. In this case I’m using durock concrete drywall, which is fireproof, mold and mildew resistant, and a good insulator.”





“To wrap it up, I added a few coats of paint [A,B,and C], and then a linoleum floor to help cut down on dust and such. Now the room is pretty much ready for electronics and cooling equipment! I’ll be showing you guys pictures of those in the near future once they all arrive.”

Stay tuned for the next installment, where Kris sets up hardware and puts his systems to work!

Lisa Liang

Marketing Assistant