You'd probably be best off getting an industrial rig designed for high dust/heat environments.  I'd stay out of the attic (although your attic temps are nowhere near as bad as ours), the garage is likely to be OK in CA, though.
For people in Phoenix, the answer is usually different.  Any location over 100 degrees is likely to place significant thermal stress on a system, and over 180 (as a Phoenecian attic often is) can blow out a system pretty quickly.
If you have a water cooling rig and a source of cold water, then you can probably support pretty high temperatures, although that depends a lot on how efficient your overall thermal system is, and you may still see reduced component lifespan (particularly for disk drives).

In most cases placing the home server in a closet or utility room works well, so long as you can keep it well ventilated and dry (I don't recommend laundry rooms most times, because the dryer lint gets in everything, and it's worse than regular household dust).

==Joseph++

Ted Gould wrote:
> Hey all,
> 
> So I'm in the position where I'd like to have a little more computing
> power close to me instead of "in the cloud."  But, I really don't want
> to put a computer in my office, I'd prefer to hide it in the "local
> cloud."
> 
> It seems like the two issues now become dust and heat.  I'd love to put
> it in the garage or attic, but I'm curious if that's just simply
> impractical.  Has anyone done something like this?  What problems did
> you encounter?
> 
> 		--Ted
> 
> 
> 
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