epic.Technology
In my spare time, I’m the technical manager for epic.LAN. It’s a small (50-100 player) LAN Party based in the Stoke/Crewe area. With an aim of getting back to the core fun of LAN parties and bringing a party-like social atmosphere inspired by LANs like DreamHack, it’s a great event.
As technical manager, I’m pretty much in charge of making sure the LAN side of it works. This includes servers, network, wireless and all the websites (written by ChicagoTed) and supporting systems. Admittedly it’s not an impressive a job as doing a similar task for the UK’s largest LAN Party or DreamHack but it’s still a nice challenge.
With our first event over and done with, it’s good to finally sit back and relax and now go into some detail and analysis of what we did, where we went wrong, what we got right and how we’re going to improve.
The Network
The core of any LAN party, the network is the second most important thing at a LAN after power. At epic.LAN we provided network for approximately 85 PCs, servers, laptops and consoles. The network consisted of the following:
- Netgear 48 port gigabit switch
- 48 port Cisco 3500 10/100 switch
- 16 port Cisco 3500 10/100 switch
- 24 port 3Com Superstack gigabit switch
- 3 x 24 port 3Com Superstack 10/100 switches
- Extreme Networks 48 Port 10/100 switch
One of the Cisco switches and the 3Com’s were provided by Jester who helps run DreamLAN and is technical director for QuadV. As you can see, this a ragtag bunch of switches from 4 different manufacturers. Unfortunately for epic.LAN, we’re still small and expanding so for epic.ONE it wasn’t possible to purchase the switches we’d have liked to have.
There were only a few problems with the switches. Firstly, one of the 3Com switches proved to be unreliable on some of the network ports, so was swapped out for the Extreme networks switch. There was a minimal customer impact to this, which was good. Far more problematic was the Netgear switch we were using as our core switch. We had a power cut to the venue in the first couple of hours of the event, this caused a problem with the Netgear switch and it stopped working properly. 70% packetloss and 500ms ping replies were seen across different ports within the switch. We had to swap it out for the gigabit 3com switch. This sorted out the problems and from here on, the LAN was fine.
The ultimate plan is to have 100mbps switches at all the desks, with 2 trunked 1gbps copper uplinks to the core switch. This would give every person 100mbps to the core network, which should be fine for now. We should be able to have this implemented for epic.TWO which will reduce our reliance on borrowed equipment and allow us to thoroughly test all the kit before.
Mar 31 2009Categories: epic.LAN, LAN Parties Page: 1 2 3 :