Time to accept defeat and call it a Victory

It's kind of done, well at least for the moment it is. The case is finished and all the motherboards ( One failed at the last minute. It doesn't boot or beep an error it doesn't even post. My investigations so far point to a capacitor failure, so I'm going to look into trying to return it and get a replacement) 5 out of 6 are installed. I can connect over the local LAN via an 8 port switch and manage the machines using VNC, SSH or SFTP. I can turn them all on using my home made cable switches and turn them off either from VNC or the command line with a 'shutdown -P now' command.

The main thing I've not done yet is install and setup DrQueue or actually use the new system to render anything at all. However I'm relatively happy that I'm at a point where given extra time I could sort those things out; so now it's just a matter of finding the time.

There are a couple of other things I'd like to do. Firstly on my master box I have a problem in that the network manager connects to both wifi1 and eth0 successfully but only allows you to use eth0. So far my research is indicating a routing problem but I've not had time to experiment with this. Secondly and dependent on the first thing being resolved is that I'd like to enable Internet connection sharing so that I could run updates and installs easily across all five nodes.

The Pictures

 These are my momentary cable switches. Considering how ramshackle they look they work surprisingly well. I am particularly pleased with the connectors I made for the two pins out of the cable itself and some insulation tape. I may do a little film showing how that was done.

 I definitely need to do some more work to the back of the box. I'm thinking of turning a couple of the draws into plates to cover the back.

 Evidence that it all kind of works. This screen is showing an active connection via VNC to nodes1 to 5.

The lights I've added look just so cool with the lights low. Much much better than any of these pictures show. It actually comes out of the Blender logo on the top as well.

This is a poor picture. I'll have to get my tripod out and do some slow shutter speed shots.