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Ultimate Guide to Hosting a LAN Party

Posted by Hemos on from the planning-and-preparing dept.

WebWord writes "The title says it all. This really is the best damn guide to setting up a LAN party I have ever seen. They cover all the details from equipment to food to network protocols. Excellent!"

5 of 264 comments (clear)

  1. Lanparty.com by *Pres* · · Score: 5, Informative

    A guide like this has existed for quite some time. Check out lanparty.com. It rocks!

    Here's a direct link to their guide to hosting a lanparty

    http://www.lanparty.com/theguide/

  2. Re:bandwidth by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    No. The first rule of the LAN party is that you don't talk about the LAN party.

  3. Re:I disagree on mice by DarkEdgeX · · Score: 5, Informative

    I just recently got into using optical mice, and I love them-- for some reason (maybe it's my own fault) dust and whatnot screws up old-style ball mice for me faster than anything (sometimes to the point where left/right motion won't function).. with this optical mouse though, there's just about nothing that can cause me to have that same experience. As for your concerns about "pointing better and tracking more accurately", I believe they are unfounded. Microsoft's IntelliMouse Optical, IntelliMouse Explorer and Wheel Mouse Optical all take snapshots 6000 times a second-- that's more sampling than your typical ball mouse receives. (Granted, it likely never sends all that data down the wire, but it does likely process this data in the mouse to create a more accurate representation of your movements.)

    I dunno, maybe it's different mice for different folks, but you should give them another chance. =)

    --
    All I know about Bush is I had a good job when Clinton was president.
  4. Re:This guy is too difficult! by BrookHarty · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Um, no. DHCP isnt hard to setup, and any linux geek could download dhcpd and the sample config works fine. And @home/dsl(some) peeps seem to use dhcp anyways, all lan parties I goto use DHCP so nobody has to give out settings. Plus you can do cool stuff like playing with DNS and redirects. So people can hit the fileservers without knowing its ips. http://files and they can get all the mods/patches.

    I personally love DHCP, I can plug in my work laptop at home and not reconfigure any tcp/ip settings. I even tweaked my dhcpd.conf so that my MAC address gets the same IP and network settings for VPN.

    Also, Now that switches are cheap, might as well spend the extra 10-20 bux and get a switch. 8 ports switches are like 40 bux now.

  5. From experience... by jaavaaguru · · Score: 5, Informative
    I've hosted a few LAN parties at my house, and we're doing it more now (2 in the last 2 weeks). It's usually 8 to 15 people. Nobody's got any amazing hardware, just a few 8 port 10Base-T hubs, although we'll be going 100mbps soon.

    Things that are important to us:

    • DHCP - I know people say its simpler to let Windows arrange the networking by itself, but generally all my friends houses (that are big enough to have a LAN party at) aleardy have DHCP, and Windows messes it up sometimes anyway when there's lots of people. Plus, DHCP will set up your internet gateway and DNS too :-)
    • Air conditioning - Even with 5 people in a small room on a cold day it gets pretty warm pretty quickly
    • Be near a shop - No matter how prepared you are, you'll always need more food (unless you're rich and over-buy to start with
    • Someone experienced in networking - It sucks when people get confused about what an uplink socket is for. You should have someone that knows all about it overseeing the network setup.
    • Installation Disks/CDs - We had one computer refuse to see the network and refuse to re-install its network drivers, so it needed Windows re-installed (typical); and another lost its registry and didnt have it backed up. it's always a good idea to have Video, Sound, Network and Windows installation CDs with you.
    • Internet - People need a break from gaming at some point and most geeks need to check their mail. I've also found this to be useful for downlaoding latest patches, using USENET (or Google) to find the answer to some strange compatability problems, etc.
    • Music - The louder the better. And make sure there is one source of music (people's PC should be playing sound effects - not music. If its' mp3 music, get it all onto the machine thats's going to play it at the start so SMB file transfers aren't slowing down the network during gameplay.
    My friends and I haven't ventured into the organized type of party where there are tournaments and prizes, but I think we'll be trying that next time, just for a change.

    P.S. Why do people try to bring up the subject of terrorist attacks in nearly every slashdot discussion? That's really annoying to some people. If you're going to discuss terrorism, do it in a newsgroup about terrorism, or current events.
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