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HOWTO LAN Party HowTo


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static

Moderator

Joined: 16 Apr 2002

Posts: 313

Location: Canada

 

Posted: Thu Apr 25, 2002 1:29 pm Post subject: LAN Party HowTo

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Quote:

Switches? SWITCHES? We don't need no stinkeen switches!!!

 

 

There comes a time, in every computer geek's life, when you just hafta party! Here's how:

 

* Make sure firewalls are disabledturned off, except the one between your LAN and the internet.

* Choose to use static IP's if you ever want to be able to go directly to a PC - DHCP is a lot easier, but it's harder to figure out which IP is for which machine. I like DHCP, 'cause everyone just obtains their IPs automatically - no config required. Just "plug and play".

* Get people to have their OS running before hand - and e-mail them any help they might need to know how to get what hardware isn't yet working for them to work (or how to disable their firewall or whatever). The more ready they are when they arrive, The quicker and more fun your day will be.

* Have games preinstalled - this isn't always possible - sometimes you need them to arrive to get a game - but otherwise have your copy installed already. The best LAN games are:

 

* Grand Theft Auto 2

* Star Tek: Armada II

* Quake 3Unreal Tournament

* Starcraft

* Baldur's Gate I&II & Icewind Dale

* Shogun: Total War

* Jedi Knight 2

* Return to Castle Wolfenstein only if there's small maps available to your group (download some) and you have at least 6 people

 

Know who's bringing hubs or switches andor network cables (if more than 2 players) - don't wait 'til the last minute to know where this stuff is coming from!

 

Have everyone bring headphones instead of PC speakers (for a couple of reasons)

 

Think of a setup before hand of where to seat everyone - table spac is for monitors and k/b mouse - towers should go on the floor. Have groups clustered to fascilitate using hubs and shorter network cables

 

Have at least one female-to-female RJ-45 connector lying around; it's saved me so many times! Add the length of any cable to any cable!

 

Have fun

2 player

Use an RJ-45 crossover networking cable directly between the two NICs (network interface cards). Enjoy.

 

More than 2 Players

Use straight-thru cables for everything. It's always great if someone owns a broadband router - it can automatically assign IP's, usually have a built in 4 port switch, etc, etc... if you need more ports, a switch is a lot faster and smarter than a hub - less collisions of data = less lag in games. But hubs will do! And hubsswitchesrouters all can be strung together to provide enough room...

 

Have each person bring a little something (bag of chips, for munchies) and all split on beer and pizza AND GO NUTS!

 

 

clown

Frequent user

Joined: 03 May 2002

Posts: 33

Location: Kentucky

Posted: Fri May 03, 2002 4:04 pm Post subject:

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static,

Great ingredients for a successful LAN party. A group of us here in the western part of KY have a LAN party every couple of months and it is a blast. The next LAN, I be using linux, hopefully.

 

later,

clown

 

 

JollyRogers

Frequent user

Joined: 07 May 2002

Posts: 51

Posted: Sun May 19, 2002 7:48 pm Post subject:

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We have a LAN party in Dahlgren, Virginia the first Friday of every month. Wohoo! We call ourselves CRUD (dont aks me what it stands for?). But what is cool is my son and I show up running our LINUX boxes (exclusively) and those windows guys look on...what is that??? Well I got a couple to "try", but I don't wanna talk about that. What was really interesting is watching people reboot machines and seeing blue screens of death! This kills my son (who is 14 BTW!). He counts them each time we go. It is funny. But what was really funny was watching the network go down and peoples machines freaking out with the exception of ours. " Hey buddy you wanna plug that link back in so I can ping those boxes???" The response. Don't bother our machines are locked! I don't think I rebooted one time at those LAN parties. Oh wait a sec...when we blew the breaker I had to reboot!

 

 

static

Moderator

Joined: 16 Apr 2002

Posts: 313

Location: Canada

Posted: Thu May 23, 2002 8:27 pm Post subject:

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We had one about 2 months ago and the power did the freakiest thing (not to mention the worst imaginable thing if you're a PC user...) It went ONOFFONOFFONFFOOFONFONFONFONFFONFNOFONFONOFF really really fast over about 5 seconds. DAMN! I dove for the power bar just as it stopped - and stayed out for 3 hours! By that time only the 2 guys from the neighbouring province had stuck around! Oh well - nothing seemed to fry...

 

 

Afrosheen

Moderator

Joined: 16 Apr 2002

Posts: 197

Location: Dallas, TX

Posted: Tue May 28, 2002 6:23 am Post subject:

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Power power power. This is probably the single highest concern of any lan party and is always overlooked. Make sure everyone has a surge protector and their own power strip. Don't let them show up with two black cords in their hand and grope for somewhere to plug them in. Evil or Very Mad If you're doing this at your home/large apartment, make sure you know where all the power outlets are. The biggest cause of blowing breakers or overloading fuses is plugging too much stuff in one socket. If you need to, unplug your tv/vcr/stereo/whatever and use that plug instead.

 

I've been to lan parties at colleges and have tried to game (after tripping the breaker every 15 minutes) more times than I can count. Unless you're in an office building or a well-designed, modern home, keep the head count low. Most pc's draw more wattage than you think and when you add a room full of Athlons it gets bad quick.

One more thing to consider is cooling. Your pc doesn't generate much heat at idle, but as you game your cpu and video card will get warm and raise the ambient temperature a little. If you get 5 or 6 other people there's a good chance you'll all be sweating shortly. Get a fan or two ready just in case. You'll be glad you did. Nothing worse than 6 sweaty geeks cursing at power failures.

 

 

 

Oldguy

Newbie

Joined: 02 May 2002

Posts: 5

Posted: Sat Jun 01, 2002 5:29 am Post subject:

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My kids and I are hopeless Unrealtournment addicts. So naturally we have had several LAN parties. My wife prepares a feast of snack type foods for the players.

 

Anyway at the last party, Xmas 2001, we had a party setup for 20 players. Only 16 actually showed up. We setup tables in 3 rows of 3 tables each, 2 players per table. And an odd ball table with 2 more positions. I dearly wanted to use Linux for the game server but was still very green Linux wise and I hadn't gotten UT to play well with Linux as the server. (MDK8.0) So I reverted to my Win98SE box for the actual game server. I booted my linux box into Win98 to be used as a map redirect server and statistics server.

 

I used static IPs as it was just easier to do since I hadn't figured out DHCP with Linux yet. As the players started to arrive and get hooked up I realized that some of them were proud owners of WinXP. Something started nagging at me but I couldn't figure out what it was.

 

The gaming got started and everything was going well for about an hour when the network started getting flakey. The game server couldn't get the map requests to the map server. A quick check of the good 'ole network neighborhood showed it to be empty. Hmmmm....I also noted that the XP machines were crashing at increasing intervals. The net would come back then disappear. After a few of these cycles I realized that the net was going down when one of the XP machines went down. It was then that realized what I had done.

 

During my learning experience of Linux and SAMBA I had turned off all the master browsing functions in my Win98 machines so that SAMBA could run my home LAN. When I booted the Linux box back into Win I lost my only master browser. The XP machines being from the NT background were winning the master browser elections and then crashing. Aaaaackkkkkkk!!!

 

Wait......Linux and SAMBA! OMG.....That's it!!!!! Shocked

 

The Linux box already had SAMBA setup for my home LAN. All I had to do was reboot that box back into Linux and let SAMBA take over the network. Prefered master= yes, OS level= 33. It worked like a charm. Because I had wanted to use Linux anyway, I had already set up the map and statistics server on it. The LAN party proceeded for the rest of the weekend with no more network troubles. NONE.

 

By the way, the XP machines continued to crash. Smile

 

 

static

Moderator

Joined: 16 Apr 2002

Posts: 313

Location: Canada

Posted: Mon Jun 03, 2002 9:46 pm Post subject:

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Yeah, I should clarify that DHCP thing a bit. For it to work, you need a DHCP SERVER!! Smile Forgot to mention - my Linksys router is a dhcp server, so it's really easy that way. Without it, the network would need a box to be configured as a DHCP server, in which case it might be easier to those who lean toward newbiedom to just stick with static ip's.

 

Afrosheen - You very right about the power issue - but in my anecdote I don't think it was us because it came back on by itself... Confused

 

 

 

frew

Senior user

Joined: 01 Jun 2002

Posts: 214

Location: Mississippi

Posted: Mon Jun 03, 2002 10:37 pm Post subject:

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yeah DHCP is a good thing to have..It eases things a lot. I am actually having a fairly large (10 people) and long (3 days) lLAN party in a couple of weeks...I always get people to bring like 15 bucks for pizza and stuff, games (especially ones with a spawn option), and one of the biggest things...a fan. since I host the entire thing in my room it gets pretty hot. but if you have a fan per person its pretty good. Thats our biggest deal...heat. plus everyone but me uses winblows. btw one of my friends got sof 1 and 2 and apparently it works with both linux and 'dows out of the box. (Rune is good too, its ut with swords.)

 

 

 

Editor's note: This thread was originally posted at the old MUB (Mandrake User Board at club-nihil). This post is the result of a 99% automatic backup, so due to its nature some text may be lost (improbable but possible).

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  • 4 months later...
  • 1 year later...
* Grand Theft Auto 2

* Star Tek: Armada II

* Quake 3Unreal Tournament

* Starcraft

* Baldur's Gate I&II & Icewind Dale

* Shogun: Total War

* Jedi Knight 2

* Return to Castle Wolfenstein

Whoa whoa... you guys run those games on Linux? Are there any good ones out there free and available? (Unfortunately, I'm neither, so who knows when I'll have time to play them, but as the college semester resumes, it's good to keep these things in mind. :))
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http://www.wesnoth.org/

http://www.freeciv.org/

http://simutrans.de/

 

Look at http://www.linuxgames.com/ for other pure linux games or ports.

 

Look at http://www.transgaming.com/ and subscribe to cedega (5 bucks/month). This soft enables windows games to run on linux. They support more than 300 games running on linux and each month, you can vote for the next game they should support.

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