Quietening an ethernet switch

I'm a geek.  As such there's a small 19" ethernet patch frame in my house and a couple of servers out in my garage, connected by cat5.

The house switch was getting noisier, and I'd already replaced the spuddy 40mm cooling fan with an expensive "quiet" one, I wasn't keen on doing the same thing again.

So I added a decent cooling fan, and here's how....


Please note this is my first attempt at an instructable.   I only thought of doing this towards the end of the build, so some of the photos are of other units.   

NOTE WELL this involves lifting the lid, and most switches have bare-naked mains power connections.  We're not touching the mains power or power supply, but they will be exposed.  Be Careful.  Oh and if this sort of work is illegal in your area then think twice.

Finally, this change adds another RU of space required for the switch.   I have a cable-management panel above the switch so its no big deal for me.

Step 1 Parts and tools required

The easiest way to do this is to buy a silent switch.  They're not common, but neither are they rare.  A HP Procurve 1800-24G is a silent web-managed all gig switch, but locally it runs to $800 NZ or so.

I have performed this fix on a Cisco 2950T (24x100 + 2xGig) and an Allied Telesyn AT9000/24 (24x Gig) both of which were cheap/free

Kit:
* An ethernet switch which needs quietening because the fan is loud.
* A large slow quiet cooling fan - I used a 120 mm Vantec Stealth double ball bearing fan, because I happened to have it.
* Four coarse-thread screws for fans, or nuts+bolts to do the same.

Optional items - more on these later.
* Foam rubber sheet for a gasket
* RC56 or RC100

Tools:
* Drill and bits, power and RCD as appropriate.
* Centerpunch
* Round file or a steel (the thing a chef uses to sharpen knives)
* Jigsaw with metal-cutting blade, and earmuffs
* Aerosol can of cold-galv paint
* Tape, duct or similar
* Permanent marker or Pencil
* Ruler or thumb or a good eye
* Screwdrivers

Comments

[mikeasaurus]

You should enter this in the Foam Challenge!

[criggie]

Heh pretty tenuous use of foam. Actually sorbathane rubber would have been a better choice but I didn't have any.

In fact, other than the resistors I already had all of this in the shed. What *does* that say about me?

[MikB]

It says you need to get a bigger junkbox to hold all your spare scavenged resistors :)

[waldosan]

personally i enjoy the sound of a server's fan, they put me to sleep. but i guess for a practical standpoint this would be fantastic, great instructable, clear advise, you did well!

[Computothought]

We have 2 routers and 1 server we need to do something like this to. The way everything is going, I might just donate them to a school.

[criggie]

10+ years ago I was working in a high school, and all the cheapy edimax ***** switches started having fan failures.

So I made an airbox using a plastic icecream container. That had an old desk fan on one side, and there were four or five 50mm flexible hoses coming off the other side. The fan was mains 240V powered and it was really loud. However it put a gale of air into those nasty 100 Mbit edimax switches, and they kept running. I believe it was still there working when the school was destroyed by earthquakes last year. Along with the Sun3/50 I made up as a clock :)