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Technical Details Behind the LAN-Party Optimized House
New submitter Temporal writes "Yesterday, Slashdot reported on my LAN-party optimized house. But, lacking from the internet at that time were key technical details: How do I boot 12 machines off a single shared disk? What software do I use? What does my network infrastructure look like? Why do I have such terrible furniture? Is that Gabe Newell on the couch? The answer is a combination of Linux, PXE boot, gPXE, NBD/iSCSI, and LVM snapshots running on generic hardware over generic gigabit ethernet. I have even had several successful LAN parties with a pure-Linux setup, using WINE."
...plenty of wine would make a Linux-centric LAN party tolerable, and perhaps even enjoyable.
It's a fair criticism. I wanted to make the desks lower but I also wanted the monitors to sit higher when folded up, and the desks were getting stupidly deep, so I had to compromise. In practice, though, people aren't typing at these desks, they're gaming, which in my experience (as someone with some RSI problems) is not as sensitive to desk height.
Honestly I'm kicking myself for not having written everything up before going public. The vast majority of people who saw the original post will not see the technical details. :/
It's like you went public beta before working out the kinks~
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
"I purchased 12 copies of Windows 7 Ultimate OEM System Builder edition, in 3-packs. However, it turns out that because the hardware is identical, Windows does not even realize that it is moving between machines."
Every computer using geek has an Asian girlfriend except me.
How they fuck do they do it?
You have to be white, nerdy, and socially awkward. I've got all three! Come hither, ladies!
I can't imagine a single machine serving out over iSCSI to have performance acceptable to play any modern, intensive game. How's it all work?
I couldn't imagine it either, but it turns out it works fine. Obviously the load times aren't blazingly fast but no one has ever complained about them being slow either.
Note that most games load all data upfront. Once they've done that, the game runs without doing much I/O.
Also note that an iSCSI image can be fully cached client-side, so if you load the same game twice, it's probably going to load directly from RAM the second time. (Most games are 32-bit so there's a good 4GB of RAM in the machines doing not much other than disk cache.)
Release early, release often. I thought that was the way we're supposed to work.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
This is a made up story by the liberal media.
Blizzard clearly stated that no one is interested in LAN parties and the whole concept is dead. Please move on. There is nothing here to see.
As the author of Syslinux/PXELINUX I found the article rather interesting and enjoyable. :)