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Help with a LAN party

A

Arksz

n00b
Joined
Mar 27, 2013
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11
Was not sure exactly where to post this so here it is!

Some friends are trying to get a bunch of people together for a LAN party. We have a good switch and a PC running as the DHCP to assign IP addresses. My biggest issue is the lack of long Ethernet cables. We can huddle about 8-10 people around the switch but after that its a loss.
I was wondering if it would be better just to bring over my Nighthawk router and use that to assign the IP's to whoever is connected to the switch and allow those on laptops to connect via wireless. Will there be any issues getting people into the same games, those on the switch and those directly on the router? What should I look out for while setting up the network. I am a bit of a noob here so its a learning process.

Quick edit, We actually have access to two switches and can run the other across the room with a 50ft cable if that would make things easier.
 
Naw, I used to be involved in hosting the biggest lan parties in Minnesota, you need to buy a box of cat5 and make some long cable runs to space people out.

Wireless will just cause bottlenecks
 
Wireless would be your desperation type last resort.

Using the 2 switches would be a good idea as long as they are both 1 Gigabit or better, but still ChRoNo16 is right. Get a box of cable and make some cables to suit your needs.
 
As a prior lan party attendee, despise the homemade cable. It will almost always fail or be missing a tab, or work good enough some of the time. Personally I'd roll as much prefab cable as you can, skipping the crimper and ends and instead going for a punch down and surface mount block for your longer runs or oddball runs. Plug prefabs into these blocks, and when the cable is bad, cycle it out. The other thing would be to have a server with a file share and latest game updates, do some sort of application filtering at the network edge to drop torrents, windows updates, etc. The worst thing at a lan is when you needed to check your email or something and nothing loads because lan party must also mean file sharing party...

Wireless should only be used for mobile devices, if you care about lag or jitter just....skip it IMO.

Since the first switch is handling DHCP you should be able to hang a dumb switch from it. For your scenario something basic like this should work: https://www.amazon.com/NETGEAR-5-Port-Gigabit-Desktop-Switch/dp/B00QR6XFHQ You'll run a cable from your main switch to this switch, say port1, then plug in up to 4 other PCs to the switch. What we used to do was put one 16 port switch in the basement, and then another switch either on another floor, or in the garage and then run a cable, now you don't have any "room hacks" when playing team based games:)
 
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main thing to be concerned with is power so you don't overload a single circuit.
 
Some 5 ports switches, a long network cable for each switch + at least one spare, and a bunch of short network cables. Don't overlook needing several power strips, would suck to have the network connections covered and not enough power outlets. And longer extension cords.

Have someone that is very familiar with changing network configs for all OSs that will be in use. There are always a few folks that have their network setting weird for some reason but have no clue how to change to accept DHCP.

Make sure the PC doing DHCP is NOT a gaming PC. Rebooting the DHCP server in the middle of a game session sucks.
 
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