Photos and Commentary from a few small home I.T. Projects

Most of these photos are from a PC tower so I'll cover that first.  This PC build is something I advised my dad about after he purchased the case and most of the internal parts.  While initially the collection of parts meets the needs of the simulations my dad runs at home, my biggest concern with this setup is the limited air-intake area on the tower case.  The general convention when designing a tower setup with desirable air-flow tends to place intake near the lower front face of the case, and exhaust at the upper-back face or rear-top face.  However this case has a very narrow intake opening on the front-bottom face.  I found this particularly concerning because, especially on a carpeted floor, this can add resistance to the motion of air intake, and cause more dust to catch in this rather acute opening, as opposed to a larger one that faced front and interacted with open air.  While I would advise a different case entirely, this PC isn't seeing gratuitous use, so I'm not worried that it'll get clogged with dust any time soon. 
The final 2 images in this slideshow are of a light-weight Network Attached Storage server that runs on a RaspberryPi.  I have built 2 of these now, one at my parents' house in Wisconsin, one at my house in Brighton MA.  Getting the device set up in WI was slow and difficult because the internet connection was slow and not entirely reliable.  I had to repeatedly attempt updating PiOS and installing Open Media Vault through failed or timed-out connections, until I found that the network had inadvertently assigned the Pi the wrong IP address.  After resolving this, things went pretty smoothly.  Setting up a similar device in Boston went very quickly because we have about a 0.5Gb uplink from the ISP, but the hardware assembly was a little different.  In both cases we encounter one critical issue, and that is the limit of data transfer over Wi-Fi Networks.  While these NasPi devices were originally intended for storing backup images, the usual bandwidth of a wireless network can cause a backup to take 12 or more hours to complete.  This is not ideal if you are backing up a computer with limited RAM, as you might be inclined not to use it during backup operations.  If I had greater control over the network infrastructure at both locations, I would like to ensure that both the storage device, and the PC being backed up were connected to the network by an ethernet connection, so that the only limitations on the backup operation are internal to the involved devices.