Running a LAN on a hotel network

F

f1y

Supreme [H]ardness
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Dec 30, 2005
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Me a buddy are planning on hosting a 100 man LAN at a hotel. What would be the best way to patch internet to all of them.

I was thinking some sort of sonicwall configured to allow the Sonicwalls mac address on the hotel network. Then have our sonicwall act as DHCP server.

How would I configure the sonicwall? Just as a static config? I'd assume I'd need to call their IT help desk to get the main setup info.

Has anyone done this? Is their an easier way?
 
Hotels do not usually have an IT helpdesk. They pretty much all contract the service out to a 3rd party company to runs things for them.

How much traffic are you talking here? I don't know how much bandwidth 100 people need to play all the newest online games.
 
bring a 100 port switch or 2 50 port switches... make sure you can do a wired connection at the hotel most only supply very poor wireless that barely works... As well as most motels the setup is cobbled together and usually consumer grade... as my motel is...
 
It's a big marriott hotels and suites. Wired connection available.

Gear all down. I just need something in layer 3 to hand out IPs. Weren't not going to want to clear everyone's Mac address to get Internet.

Well only needed it for browsing and downloading patches for games if needed. Normally we have a path server, by it always comes out that Internet is needed for something/
 
Are you using their drops in each hotel room or something? I would patch all the rooms you need to multiple 48 port switches and put a router between your switches and the rest of the hotel's switches. You separate yourselves that way then.
 
yea your going to need 3 48 port switches or 5 24 port switches and 3 or 5 routers to have the router authed by the hotel and then the lan people get into 1 of 3 pods or one of 5 pods i suppose you could bridge the 3 routers but that would not make it fun to play across but each of the routers will do dhcp over the lan they control and work to protect you from the hotels network ask the marriot about hosting a lan party they might have a system setup for it...
 
I'm living in a hotel right now and I just authenticated my router's MAC and have my four computers access it through that. Don't need to authenticate each machine since the network only sees my router's mac.

You will probably need some business class hardware to do the same with that many computers.
 
Yeah, we'll be in a partyroom at the hotel. So we'll take one line > sonicwall > 2 48 port switches and couple 16 ports
 
Check out FITES.net

Its a LAN community that hosts a 200 man LAN at the Holiday Inn in Mechanicsburg PA every february that our gaming group attends.

They do not use the hotel internet. I can understand why. I travel alot for work and hotel internet usually sucks. With 100 extra probably more "hardcore" PC users on it, it would be like having no internet at all.

FITES brings in their own internet connection to the hotel through comcast. A nice 200Mb pipe. You might want to look into that. And they run the whole thing behind pfsense. 10/100 cisco switches at each table with gigabit uplinks to the core switch.

Check out their website. They have a forum. They are a pretty cool group of guys. I'm sure they'd share their secrets with you. They are hardcore into the LAN scene and dont want it to die off.

btw..... where is this lan you're hosting?
 
Too far. Damn.

Guess there isnt much else going on in Arkansas other than a group of dudes getting together and playing video games.

haha i'm jokin :D
 
Good luck with that.

Most hotels have no idea what the internet even is, and they probably have either 3M/768 DSL or a T1.

Having worked in the HSIA Hospitality industry here's my advice: Find somewhere else to host the party, or rent a dedicated pipe from a local ISP.
 
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