Small home - LAN party area setup

[AISnake]

Hello,
I'm asking here because I want to make my basement area for LANs with friends, also be nice to have enough switching performance to handle streaming in FullHD up to 10 computers, currently have only 2 Wi-Fi (RT-N18U) at house, I'm willing to invest, but prefer to stay on some reasonable budget. The maximum of PC clients on wifi+lan should be around 12 at peak + some tablets, smartphones etc.

What setup do you suggest? Take 1 cable to the basement and add some fast switch? Should it be enough? Or completely rework setup ?

 

[Zepher]

Might need to upgrade your basements circuits to handle the load.
12 gaming PC's each pulling 300 watts from the wall is 30A. That 300watt/PC is just an estimate it may quite a bit more depending on the configuration.

16 Port Gigabit Switch and 1 wire to the router is all you would need for your LAN gaming in the basement

Where would you be streaming HD from, the internet or from a local machine? If it's from the internet, it will depend on your internet speed, if it's from a local machine, it's going to depend on the machine serving the video.

 

[Daedalus0101101]

Zepher is right. I would worry more about the power capabilities. I would call 300Watt power supplies conservative. Most of the people I know today have anywhere from 600-900watt power supplies.

Depending on what type of features you need for your switch, you can pick up a decent switch from as little as $80 (Amazon--Netgear GS116) up to a rough $300 ( Cisco SG300-20) for a switch that lets you do VLANs, QoS, LACP, switchport-security, etc... and drop a line down to the basement.

 

[tonyyy]

what kind of games are you playing?

are they all lan base games? hardly any lan games left except for counter strike...

you want to find out your max upload as gaming with 5 or more people with 5mbps upload can cause some latency issues.

 

[Zepher]

what kind of games are you playing?

are they all lan base games? hardly any lan games left except for counter strike...

you want to find out your max upload as gaming with 5 or more people with 5mbps upload can cause some latency issues.

Unreal Tournament is free now and has LAN option. I was playing it yesterday with some bots and it runs and looks great (updated graphics), and plays great too. Still plays like I remember it 15 years ago.

 

[Dead Parrot]

Some lessons I have learned from doing small lan parties.

Avoid wifi. It seems every computer has a different way of configuring wifi and you can waste a lot of time trying to make it work. Plus you have a lot of computers sending a lot of small packets all competing for one AP.

Make sure all computers on your network have auto update anything turned OFF! Nothing frells up ping rates like a PC deciding that the middle of a battle is a good time to start downloading 400M of updates.

Have the game(s) you want to play worked out ahead of time. Wasting hours installing, updating and troubleshooting game installs sucks.

For your infrastructure, run two cables to your basement. The spare won't cost much extra and might come in handy. Have a spare switch and lots of spare NIC cables. A working 10/100 hub is far better then a dead Gig switch. Like others have said, verify your AC power capability. Its not just the PCs but the monitors as well. Will probably need at least two 20A circuits. You will also need two or three large capacity(8+ outlet) power strips with long cords(10+ft). It really helps if most of the cable rat nest is kept on the table rather then on the floor. Have several spare power cords. Amazing how many folks don't bring one.

Make sure your edge router is up to the task. Some consumer routers seem to have issues handling more than a few devices. You will be getting into the small business range of device numbers and bandwidth requirements, especially for the video part.

 

[Zepher]

Maybe get a couple of these strips,
http://www.amazon.com/Tripp-Lite-PS...826819&sr=8-1&keywords=tripp+lite+power+strip

And setup the tables in the middle of the room and have all cabling on the table, sort of like this from a console based LAN party we had a few years back with some of the Ubisoft Frag Dolls,

we had members from the FragDolls forum from all over the country come and attend,

 

[Warrior]

BTW, I have a few 16 port Gigabit switches laying around also a 24 Port. Send me a PM if you're interested in them.

 

[AISnake]

Amazing folks, thanks a lot. I will avoid wi-fi then. I'll also check the fuses, don't want to go black. I like the idea of more isolated circuits. Playing usually UT, CS, TrackMania, Jedi Academy, Sins of Solar Empire.

 

[rive22]

Yeah, just don't switch any breakers, big fire hazard. If you live in a house you can have a 220v subpanel put in with a dedicated circuit.

 

[Zepher]

I had two 20A circuits installed a couple of months ago since the garage only had one 15A outlet and the new portable AC unit uses a bit over 1000watts so with my one PC it would sometimes trip the breaker.
So I have the original 15A plus a pair of 20A circuits, one for the AC and one for the PC.

Also, you will need to cool the room as 10-12 PC's plus people will generate a lot of heat.

 

[bds1904]

Also, you will need to cool the room as 10-12 PC's plus people will generate a lot of heat.

Cooling:
Cooling is why we stopped doing LAN-parties in basements; no options for airflow most of the time. At least upstairs you have windows for air circulation. Even having central A/C won't matter if you don't have a thermostat in the basement.

Router:
Even if you have a 150mbit WAN connection, running a consumer router with 20 active users is a bad idea. The NAT table will fill and you will start getting timeouts and slow speeds. Solution? Ubiquiti EdgeRouter Lite.

Switch:
Quanta LB4M. Available here for $109. You can max out that switch with transfers and it'll handle it with ease. First benefit is IT'S CHEAP!. Second benefit, 10Gb uplinks for future server interfaces or backbone to another siwtch. Third, IT'S CHEAP!, buy a spare. Only downside is power usage idle is about 60-80w, something you may want to reserve for parties only.

Power:
Count on having no more than 5 PC's on a circuit. Any more than that and you'll start having breaker's pop. We used to count on 3 but that was before LCD's.

Streaming server:
If you are going to be transcoding you are going to need a beast! If it is just a file server and the PC's are going to be doing the decoding an i3 class (or better) with multiple disks to spread the load will be necessary. I also suggest getting a 10Gb adapter for $20 here. The SFP's that come with the switch I mentioned earlier work with this adapter. For fiber you will need a LC-LC Duplex 50/125 Multimode Patch cord. Cheap

Power suggestion:
If running isolated circuits isn't an option, put people in different rooms that have different circuits. Cables running around the house for a party isn't a big deal. Just don't start adding more switches with 1Gb uplinks to the mix, it'll be a bottleneck. For example, 1 switch downstairs & 1 upstairs with 10Gb fiber between them, run patch cords to PC's from there.