Cdoc Laboratories — By Popular Demand
Meet
Speedy.
The Cdoc Laboratories bench mule. Wine box chassis, label-maker name badge,
whatever motherboard needs to be in there this week. Speedy has booted more operating systems,
destroyed more data on purpose, and prototyped more production servers than any
rack-mounted equipment we've ever owned.
🍷 The Chassis
A Far Niente
wine box.
The box is a Far Niente wine crate. The name is a label maker.
The fan cutouts are hand-routed. The whole thing was built because
a real case would have been less interesting.
The motherboard changes. The power supply changes. The drives
change constantly. The box has never changed. Speedy is the box.
Chassis vintage: eternal | Mobo: current | Philosophy: unchanged
The Build — A Brief History
Chapter 1 — The Chassis
Empty box.
Big plans.
A Far Niente wine crate, a drill, and a general unwillingness to use
a normal computer case. The lid slides. The wood is solid.
The screw holes are where they need to be. This is engineering.
Chapter 2 — Power
PSU in.
Cables everywhere.
Power supply mounted, SATA power runs laid out, Molex connectors
accounted for. It looks like a mess. It is a mess.
It works perfectly. These are not mutually exclusive.
Chapter 3 — The Board
MSI Z77A.
Current resident.
Intel LGA1155, dual-channel DDR3, PCIe lanes, the whole deal.
Installed in a wine box. The board doesn't know. The board doesn't care.
It posts, it boots, it works. That's the whole job.
First boot — lab context.
Dell monitor, blue wall, sticker bench, Speedy on the workbench with the lid on.
The lab has been running since 1994. The stickers tell that story better than we can.
POST screen — blue screen of success.
Not that blue screen. The good one. Memory counted, drives found,
SLED 1 and SLED 2 ready for whatever comes next.
Chassis
Far Niente
Wine Crate
Eternal. Never replaced. Never will be.
Expansion
SLED 1 &
SLED 2
Wooden drive trays. Hand-built. Slide out. Hold anything.
Primary Role
Whatever
Needs Doing
Server prototyping, data recovery, OS archaeology, mass destruction.
Speedy at Work
Full combat configuration.
SLED 2 extended, drives stacked on both sleds, cables doing their best.
This is what a data recovery or mass destruction session looks like from the outside.
From the inside it's a lot of terminal windows and strong opinions.
What Speedy Actually Does
Server Prototyping
Build it here
before it's real.
Every custom server Cdoc builds for a client gets prototyped on Speedy first.
Network config, service stack, security posture — tested, broken, and fixed
in the lab before anything touches production hardware.
If it doesn't survive Speedy it doesn't leave the building.
Mass Data Destruction
When drives need
to not exist anymore.
Decommissioned hardware, client equipment, drives that need to be
provably empty before they leave the building. Speedy runs the wipes,
verifies the passes, and generates the paperwork.
Multiple drives simultaneously. SLED 1 and SLED 2 earn their keep.
Speedy has outlasted a dozen motherboards. The wine box is eternal.
