Hope to open Lan Center have Hardware questions

m4ck

m4ck

Weaksauce
Joined
Jul 16, 2003
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65
I am very seriously looking into opening a Lan Center. I've even come up with a name and looking into Location in my town for rent. I have been into multiplayer pc games for about 12 yrs now. Attended many lan parties, and helped run a few. I've never prepared for something of this magnitude though. If I am going to get this business going I want to do it right. I want the players to want to return. I have no problem with the gaming hardware. I have been building pc's for 10 plus yrs. I am self taught at everything. My networking skills are average or slightly above I would think. I'm planning on having 30 to 35 pc's set up at first. There will also be 10 to 15 stations for people to bring there own pc's. They still pay to play on a high speed network. Bandwidth is my first question. I know I need switches and not hubs. I am that smart (heh). I am familiar with trunking and cascading on a 10/100 mbs switches. My question is should I go this route and have 2 32 port 10/100mbs switches cascaded or 4 16 port 10/100mbs switches trunked 4 way. Or 24 port switches which seem more available. Or should I just go with Gigabit Switches and if so which ones and why. Would something like this work 96 port switch with gigabit uplink . Next question should I go with on board gigabit lan or spend the extra and get network cards for each pc.

thanks for any help guys.
if I get this thing going sometime I will throw a party when we open for the [H]'ers.
M4ck
LanFrenzy
 
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Generally speaking you should stear away from cascading switches unless its absolutely neccessary. The only time I do that nowadays is if the physical topology requires it. As for what speed your switches should be, I'd stick with 100BaseT for the clients and GigE uplinks to your core switch. To be honest, when you consider the low amount of bandwidth actually required by today's games (36Kbps-96Kbps), you could easily support your requirements with a 10BaseT network. However, it's not even funny to recommend a 10BaseT network for any modern enterprise. In your case 100BaseT will suffice just fine.
 
Thanks for the info. IGames looks like a great place for me to get some info. If anyone else has any tips or thoughts please share them.
 
Well, I run the networks for www.lanwars.org

Stop by if you need info. We've been doing this professionally for several years now and I like to think we've got most of the kinks worked out of our system. Every once in a while something new pops up, but we've been pretty good about being well prepared. And this is said after out site was hacked a few days ago due to a php exploit we were unpatched for. Now we know better and, knock on wood, we'll be a little more proactive when it comes to that sort of thing.
 
Like I said before thanks for the replies. I guess what I really want to know is what brand of switches would you guys use if it were you opening a place like this. I would like to get the best but also reasonable on the pocket book. I am figuring 3 24 port switches will probably run me close to $ 350.00 a piece. Does this look right to you. Just tell me what you would use.
thanks
m4ck
 
Well, without a budget, I'd reccomend the following.

3 Dell PowerConnect 2324 24 port 10/100 switches with dual Gigabit Uplinks $99 each after $50 MIR.

Then I'd hook those into a Dell PowerConnect 2608 8 port GigE switch $109 after $50 MIR.


Run 100BaseTX to all the clients, evenly distributed across the slower switches, then hook those 3 into the GigE switch through the uplink, plus hook my server(s) into the spare ports on the GigE switch. There's your network backbone for $406 after rebates. Plus, the Dell warranty has next day replacement for parts included for a year, so if something does break, its fixed the next day.
 
I'd go for the managed Dell powerconnect switches, yes they are more expensive, but at least you've got some kind of manageability features built in that can help in keeping the network running smoothly.

For example, if you wanted to check the bandwidth of all the network devices and graph them, you can use MRTG to graph all the parameters of each network port such as bandwidth utilization, errors, discards, etc.
 
But for a gaming center, I don't think the benefits a managed switch will offer are worth the added costs in this instance. Really, how imporant is it to see how much bandwidth a machine is using if its only a gaming rig/access product to begin with. Now on the server side/core of the buisiness that's a different story.
 
Originally posted by BobSutan
But for a gaming center, I don't think the benefits a managed switch will offer are worth the added costs in this instance. Really, how imporant is it to see how much bandwidth a machine is using if its only a gaming rig/access product to begin with. Now on the server side/core of the buisiness that's a different story.
Click to expand...

I could see where it would be very useful. He's going to have customers bring in there own computers, you can't have one person hogging a ton of bandwith.

Just my 2cents
 
Yea, with people bringing in machines you need to be extra sensitive of security issues. You need to have all machines locked in and firewalled. The last thing you want is one machine getting hacked by another on the network and such.
 
Originally posted by BobSutan
But for a gaming center, I don't think the benefits a managed switch will offer are worth the added costs in this instance. Really, how imporant is it to see how much bandwidth a machine is using if its only a gaming rig/access product to begin with. Now on the server side/core of the buisiness that's a different story.
Click to expand...

It may not be important to see it on a per machine basis, but definitely the uplink ports used to bridge to other switches.

There are other benefits that may not be so obvious....

1. A Primitive block list can be implemented for those users who for one reason or another are not playing by whatever rules are set for the establishment. Yes i know MAC addresses can be spoofed, but its a start.

In addition it would probably be better to use MAC addresses as an "allowed" list rather than a block list.

2. You can administratively shutdown ports if needed in certain areas to prevent anyone trying to "sneak" a connection.

3. You can trunk multiple uplink ports if a single 10/100 uplink or gig port is not enough bandwidth.

4. VLANs to further separate network traffic and reduce congestion.

5. Spanning tree protocol to prevent inadvertent network loops (you can't tell me it doesn't happen from time to time)

6. Managed switches at least can provide clues to possible faulty network hardware.

Unmanaged switches in such an environment cannot provide any of the above.

Just because its a "gaming" LAN and not a corporate lan doesn't make it any less susceptible to the same network problems faced by corporate networks.

When gamers complain about poor network performance for a service they are paying for, I would rather have a managed switch and MRTG graphs to determine if there truly was a problem or not.
 
Wow guys thanks for all the thought you've been putting in to this. I knew I was asking in the right place. I'm working on a location right now. That is going to be one of the biggest things. I need to be in a high traffic area but I don't want the overhead associated with it. I'm trying to find a happy medium. I will keep you updated as things progress.
m4ck
 
Enterprise Level Antivirus on your servers. is an absolute must.
And possibly a wireless signal detector or a contract when they come in forcing them to disable their wireless connections, because I can see some punk enabling his Wireless connection, and trying to get some quasi-ICS setup going to milk you for a little usage with his friends outside.
 
I missed the part about them being able to bring in their own PCs. In that case I agree with locking down the access layer. Managed switches would certainly be usefull in this endeavor. Another thing, look into only offering IPs out to authenticated MAC addresses. A simple way to do this is to own all the NICs and have them pre-approved and to make people rent or buy those from you when they arrive. Its a simple money-maker which I've heard some gaming centers in the UK have adopted and seems like it'd be a pretty non-hassle way (from the network administration's POV) to add an additional layer of security. If that's not your style, just have them give you their MAC addy when they sign in. If they don't know it, a simple "IPCONFIG /ALL" in a command prompt will do the trick. Just look for the "Pysical Address"--That's gonna be your MAC address.
 
You could use USB nics that you rent to customers for the duration of their stay.

I would be really nervous about people bringing in their own PC's to my center if I were you. It's one thing when you control all the software on all the PCs in the center, it's another if some scriptkiddie boob can bring in his own PC with all his hacking tools already installed and see what kind of grief he can cause you.

Good Luck
 
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