So I've got this fun luggable that I picked up this weekend

So I've got this fun luggable that I picked up this weekend. The screen is broken, and it may have other problems, but it's still neat to open up

(sorry this is going to be a very image heavy thread and I'm posting as I take it apart, so I'm going to skip image descriptions after this one)

And inside it has this card that I pulled out: A Winnov Videum 4x SDI.

It's a capture card for SDI video.

But check out this part. See how the fan cable goes into those cuts inside the PCB?

yeah...
Rather than buy a fan with the correct length cable, they bought a fan with a cable that's too long, and then included a spot on the PCB to wrap it around.

That's... impressively lazy!

Here's the inside.
There's a PSU on the bottom left, a 2.5" hard drive on left, the full size motherboard on the back, and that tiny laptop DVD driver in the bottom-right, for some reason.

And that top card. It's not a video card, it's a Winnov Videum RGB XPress!

That's a capture card too.

It doesn't capture DVI, though: it is supposed to have an octopus cable for each of those "DVI" ports.

BTW you might look at this image and go "foone you're showing us the back of the card, flip it over so we can see the chips"

NOPE! both sides are basically blank.
They build this fucker like a sandwich, with the good bits on the inside.

I opened it anyway. The chips are mainly FPGAs and RAM, with a few other scattered about. I might come back and figure out what each of these are later.

hard drive is a 500gb Seagate Momentus.

and I think it may be dead.

Pulled the PSU. It's a Sparkle Power 480w PSU

The DVD drive is a Sony DVD/CD rewriter, apparently. An AD-7740H

And we're mostly in!

and really, what the fuck is this? Did you run out of the correctly sized fans that day?

I'm starting to worry that they custom-made this heatsink.
This thing is very heavy. I don't have a scale nearby or I'd weigh it, but it's the kind of heavy YOU DON'T PUT IN PORTABLE COMPUTERS

The bracket for the power supply (yes, really) hides another board:

This DVI to LVDS board.

They found low-profile RAM, because otherwise it'd run into the PSU

Their LVDS cables were too long (A problem NO ONE HAS EVER HAD BEFORE) so they just bundled them over here

okay, the (broken) display is an LG LP171WU5.

That's a 17.1"(43cm) laptop display, 1920x1200, LED backlight.

The bottom of the device says it came with Windows 7 Pro Embedded, and it was manufactured in March of 2012

And let's get back to what this thing is:

It's a FleXtreme NextDimension, that's what!

That's these people:
https://solutions.nextcomputing.com/

Apparently they started as Sun workstation supplier for government and military customers, and later started doing high-performance luggables for a variety of markets, including video production. Thus, this thing.
I can't find this model on their site, but they did a lot of custom things (and this thing is 12 years old: they might have just deleted it from their site )

hard drive is not dead! but annoyingly it's bigger than the spare hard drive I have in my imaging machine, so I can't just copy everything over

okay so I rapidly found out some info.

This thing does have data on the hard drive. This used to be used by a church in the bay area, and it's one that boasts on their website that they livestream their services.

I bet up until relatively recently they were using this machine to do that

relatively recently means "up until march 2020", judging by file dates.

I have their OBS config. I could make PIRATE CHURCH SERMONS!

especially if they didn't rotate their stream key between now and 2020

uh. I think this thing might have been donated from someone who worked at NetApp, and didn't clear the hard drive.

There's some files from 2016 that are Net App All Hands presentations.

NetApp Confidential - Restricted Use

YEAH ABOUT THAT: MAYBE DON'T LEAVE IT ON A HARD DRIVE IN THE GARBAGE

fun fact about this:
in 2016 I was working for Pure Storage, one of NetApp's direct competitors

I am an expert at industrial espionage but I take the slow route
I just wait 8 years for your computers to get donated to a church and then thrown out, and then I pick them up and access your presentations that were foolishly left on the hard drive!

It's the perfect crime!

the machine runs IIS for some reason. I don't really feel like looking into what this does, but I think it's some weird SOAP thing

yeah this thing has 55 files in the Archive folder, and every one I've checked is an internal confidential NetApp presentation

they're not hiring for any security positions. I checked.

Not surprised, really.

oh hey there's another folder with another archive but this is the church's livestreams.

I can pirate the Jesus!

gaze into the heatsink of insanity

so @Lapsus figured out what heatsink this is. It's an actual product that was sold, not their custom thing (though the fan mount IS custom, they made their own aluminum bracket for it)

It's a Swiftech MCX478-V (or very similar, since that one is designed for a Pentium 4, and this is a Intel Core (non-duo)

fun fact about this heatsink:
They did not, in fact, drill the screw holes at an angle. That was too hard, so they drilled them vertically, and just bent the screws.

oh god the church has a link to their sharepoint instance.

I was a bit iffy when my local church introduced powerpoint in the early 2000s, I think this fancy produced video stuff is extra bad, but Sharepoint? That's one of the layers of hell! It's in the bible*!

* it's not. I checked.

I WAS gonna email the church and tell them "hey I have 122 livestreams of yours from 2019 to 2020, do you want any of these back?" but no, now that I realize they are CORRUPTED BY THE WORLD I will simply erase all their lost data.

You had one chance, Bay Area Fancy Church. You lost it when I saw "Sharepoint"

OKAY. Machine is torn all too pieces, it's dusty as hell, and the display is broken. The hard drive works (at the moment) but if I'm not putting this thing back together, I don't really need the contents for drivers and such. So I think I'm done here for today.

Thank you for visiting my fun story of a luggable that was used by NetApp and a Specific Bay Area Church, and neither of them understood the risk of throwing away hard drives.

if I ever become a security tech/researcher, which I hope never happens, 90% of what I'll be doing is yelling at organizations that COMPUTERS (AND OTHER THINGS) HAVE HARD DRIVES IN THEM! THEY STORE DATA! THEY KEEP STORING DATA EVEN AFTER YOU PUT THE COMPUTER INTO A TRASH CAN!