epic.LAN

With 5 larger events, including our first with over 200 attendees, and 5 smaller events under our belts, epic.LAN is going great and is getting better each time. at epic.FIVE we brought back competitive tournaments with £2,000 prize money on offer.

It was the first outing of the epic.Tournament system which manages almost every aspect of running a tournament. There were some minor problems but overall it worked well. The next event is epic.SIX which has even more money on offer and should be a great summer event!

Work

I’m still working in the Web Development team at Fasthosts, bringing some great products to market. Some of the projects I’ve worked on include Virtual Servers, updated Broadband offering, hosted networks and I’m currently working on a large project that will take me through to the Summer. It’s great place to work with excellent co-workers, fully outfitted break rooms with soft drinks on-tap and a proper coffee machine.

Most of the time I’m writing PHP with the large codebase that makes up our Control Panel being my primary focus. There’s some other internal systems that are PHP based and plenty of Python used as well, so lots of opportunity to learn new things.

Web Development

The past two years have been hectic with epic.LAN taking up most of my own personal time, with the bulk of the development work done for now, I’m looking into getting involved in some open-source projects and some interesting web development for my own amusement. I’ve been paying a lot of attention to the likes of BarCamp London 8 and HackCamp and aim to attend a few of these events this year. In the meantime, I’ve set up a projects website for any small and random projects I decide to write.

I’ve also updated my GPS tracking website for the third time in about 5 years. This takes GPS data from an Android phone and plots it on a map alongside Google Latitude and also draws a trail of my position. There’s more details on the website for it.

Upcoming Events

It’s looking to be a busy summer for events, with the following already lined up:

• 22nd April – Multiplay insomnia42
• 28th April – DunceLAN 3
• 6th May – StratLAN
• 27th May – epic.lite 4
• 3rd June – LAN 42 1
• 10th June – Florida Holiday
• 30th June – StratLAN Summer Party
• 7th July – British Grand Prix
• 28th July – epic.SIX
• 26th August – Multiplay insomnia43

Twitter

As with everyone else in the world, I can be found on Twitter @MurrayMintUK. I tend to tweet irregularly as I’m not partial to blogging or micro-blogging. Feel free to follow and I’ll probably reciprocate.

I’m currently finding Twitter most useful for SMS alerts. Anytime anyone pays for an epic.LAN event, the website automatically tweets to a private Twitter account followed by myself and other members of the epic.TEAM. It’s a really cheap way of mass notifications and was a great place to test Twitter API integration.

That’s it for this post, but stay tuned for I have some good content lined up including some analysis of web development in the year 2011, a defence of PHP against critics and some articles covering the technical side of epic.LAN and what goes on behind the scenes.

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.