Bags seem to be common these days, but back in my day, we went to highschool with some sort of briefcase... Well ok, maybe only the nerds did. I was looking for something to mod, and noticed I still had the case intact, plus some old junk hardware lying around... hmmm... The result is below, a (brief)case mod, building a portable FTP server :)

There isn't really too much to mod.. First thing to do is grabbing a 486DX motherboard (with huge VGA card and IDE controllers :) ), a harddisk, a floppy (to boot the linux installation, no boot from CD in the bios) --I also temporarily wired up a CD-drive for installing Linux-- and finally a power supply. Checking the layout, it turns out it all fits very nicely :)

In fact, it fits so well I don't really need to go add stuff to hold things in place. The HD pushes against the mboard, the mboard pushes back. Everything fits like a Tetris puzzle.

The idea was to make this thing boot unattended into Linux and offer up some wftpd. First thing needed is some retro-UTP cards (no PCI on this board).. thanks eBay Belgium and Xavier Marmasse :) Next was an old keyboard, to prevent the "No keyboard present" error. I went for a keyboard instead of a stub so I could do a nice unmount / shutdown via ctrl-alt-del. Once more it turns out to fit perfectly, sitting exactly between the far end and the PSU !

It fits so well that there is zero room for movement or sliding, and I am 90% convinced now that Delsey makes their briefcases with PCs in mind :^)

So, since there wasn't much to do on the inside, I simply added a cathode tube and then proceeded with hacking up the outside a bit. Drilling a few holes on the left for ventilation, plus a larger one so I could route all the cables (power, network and possibly VGA) through there and be able to close the case while connected and running.

On the right I started again with some small holes and a square, this time to peek some LEDs through (power, HD activity and "turbo switch", heh) and a 188 LCD OEMs used to add to show off Mhz. I have lol Mhz :)

Also on the right side, a window mod to show off the cathode light.. Just a bit of dremeling, then glueing a cropped CD jewel case cover to the inside. The camera is still a piece of crap, and those things always have trouble capturing CCT kewlness too..

So, that's it !

Let's go ! :)

For the future, I may need to add a ventilator to the left where the PSU is, I noticed there's not much airflow right now.. And perhaps I may also paint the case itself a bit, I don't know. I took the train with this thing and got a lot of funny looks; if you do this, I would recommend against taking it to high security areas :)

Thanks also to Tom Mahieu for getting the NICs to boot in UTP mode (they're dual plus there's two in there).
Pictures courtesy of a Creative Webcam which as you can see is crap, sorry about that.

If you like this, check out the cryo mod as well !