Birds nests
My server, not this one, my one at home I keep in a chimney. To be exact, I keep it in a cupboard which covers the front of a fireplace. In this day and age there are no fires lit there, heat is provided by the wonderful invention of central heating.
This is a perfect place (I think so anyway), to keep my server. It is a cupboard so when closed you can't hear it apart from the very faint and distant hum (less than the boiler for instance) - this is very important as this room acts as a spare bedroom.
The downside to keeping a computer in a cupboard is air-flow. As everybody knows you must keep your computer well ventilated. Computers produce a lot of heat and this needs to be transported away to stop them from going very wrong.
That's where the large hole going up into the outside world comes in, yes the chimney. It's ideal as wind moves over the top of the chimney it sucks up air from the bottom - along with the handy fact that heat rises it's perfect. Naturally there is a piece of hardboard covering the entrance of the chimney to stop anything from falling onto the server. With enough room for air to move freely.
The downside is, this piece of hardboard is fixed permanently - so when a bird decided to screw up their blueprints for the new luxury 4 bedroom nest they were building in the chimney - it fell down. And of course blocked the chimney, any hope of ventilation. The bit of fixed hardboard made it almost impossible to dig out the nest.
Finally my father and I pulled it out last night. Took a bit longer than expected, there were a lot of twigs. I mean, loads. Trying to tug it out was just getting bits of dirt and tree all over the place.
The end result was me having to pull out the entire computer, and hold a black bag under the chimney while my Dad scooped out the nest bit-by-bit. Was hardly a nice experience.
And the really annoying thing, I've lost my wonderful up-time on my server. Oh well, now it's ventilated well again hopefully I won't have to turn it off again. Until I run out of disk space and need to add another drive, again.