Is dust bad for electronics?

What material can be used (cheap) to cover highly dust and static sensitve electronics while working/drilling?

• Hi, I have to insert a new fire suppression system in a highly controlled server room (dust/temp/humidity). When drilling holes etc apart from using tools that reduce the dust, what can I use to cover our Servers which are HIGHLY sensitive to static. I had a look at anti-static plastic but there is none available nearby. Is there any other materials with no ESD? Thought of using brown paper since paper only creates a slight positive charge. It needs to be huge sheets since there is quite a lot of server. So, what type of material/product will be safe to use?

• Answer:

  I'm assuming you're leaving the servers running? Are they rack mounted or are they towers? If they are towers, they can simply be moved to another room for a short period of time. During office downtime (after 5 pm), shut the servers down, move them to another room, grab a spare gigabit switch and a few CAT-6 cables, and your UPS's (batteries). Boot the servers up, they should boot up without needing a keyboard, mouse, or monitor attached. When you're finished, simply have your IT guy RDP into the servers to shut them down remotely, again, after hours. The problem you're going to have if they are rack servers or can't be moved is, you need to cover the servers with a blanket of some sort to keep the little dust and dirt pieces out of the server. But in doing so, you're going to cause air restrictions on the servers. If the servers don't have proper airflow in a cool environment, you're going to be looking at hardware failures fairly quickly. Alternatively, you can hang some painter's plastic from the ceiling to the floor, making a plastic wall separating the servers from your work area. But don't put the plastic too close to the servers, they need that unrestricted airflow 100% of the time.