LAN 101

LAN 101

another BONG LANparty...

Dates: 10am - 10pm 11th of September 2004
Venue: St Marys Memorial Hall
Attendance : 50 / 50

Photos


Overview

Another event.

LAN 101 in Review

General
In planning, LAN 101 was intended to build momentum and we didnt seriously expect to get 200 people attending - however we could have accomidated it. But the number that showed (40+staff) was sufficient to cover costs and generally provide some great gaming. All feedback has been very positive and i am more than pleased with the event. The atmosphere was friendly and relaxed, which, along with an absence of technical problems, made the lan truely a pleasure to run.

In thanks i would like note most strongly Wolfman for helping us out with some capital to pay for the hall as well as providing his really well set up servers which ran most of the games without a glitch.

Thanks also goes out to Splint for helping with setting up, as well as Gopher and Brett for set up and pack up.

All the rest of the staff also (goes without saying) - Taliskahn and Barracuda

We also had a record number of female participants. Two with computers and Charity as usual chilling with DDSD and generally flaunting her Philo good looks.

Data Network
The stack of cabletron 10/100 switches ran flawlessly, the gigabit uplinks ran without a hick up. DHCP ran nicely along with Dynamic DNS. Windows browsing also worked perfectly - thanks to.... Linux. You can always trust linux to know how to run a windows network better than windows does. Stupid windows 2003 server.

Power Network
We had one power disruption which seemed to effect the entire hall. Our power gear didnt trip, nor did the halls and neither were hot - All indicating that the glitch was upstream... which we can do nothing about! We are thinking about ups's for switches and servers.

Internet Connection
Big thanks to PNC for providing some free internet connection for LAN 101. Alas the hall is outside the normal operational parameters off the wireless gear. But that didnt stop us from squeezing some love out of it.

Barra, Talis and I tested it thursday night (involving me scaling the walls in the dark) and were confident we could get it again on saturday.

We secured the antennae firmly and played for a long time with its direction to get the sweetest spot we possibly could. We got ~80% signal but alas only ~50% RSSI. Which meant heavy packet loss (30% with 32 byte ping packets and 100% with 1k packets) making things pretty much useless for anything but pinging. We then cranked the gain as far as possible, squeezing a little more life out of it, but the trick that got it working usably (with about 10-15% packet loss) was by forcing the link to full 11mbps rather than letting it try to autonegotiate down (it was picking about 2mbps). The link was capped at 150k/s but at the router not the physical connection. So i would say that by increasing the transfer speed by 5, it allowed more data to pass through in 70% of good time. Net performance could be described as jumping, with some pages coming up in a snap and others just kind of coming down in dribs and drabs. We threw a cache on our end which made things alot more usable. But all in all, even though it wasnt the greatest net connection and you couldnt play games over it, it was better than a modem and was cool to set up. Please note that Planet Netcom's gear runs reliably when within its operational spec - but we were running outside their normal install range (hence why they dont install that far... because it doesnt work that well!)

We plugged the wireless link (which just runs as a bridge) into chris (talis)'s laptop, which ran as dhcp/dns/proxy via one of those SMC USB Ethernet Adapters bigpind used to give out with ADSL installs - finally we found a use for them! It was actually handy we had some laying around because there was no internal card and the solo pcmcia slot was taken with the internal network card!

Games
Most notable games were Unreal Tournament 2004, Battlefield Vietnam & 1942, some Warcraft 3 and Quake 3 made some appearance. Random games were a very large game of Multi-Theft Auto (some 12 or more people) and also the bizarre commander keen multiplayer - which just terrified be both conceptually and also in that someone actually wrote it! Tournaments just didnt happen. This was mainly due to lack of interest. I guess to build on that generally numbers werent high enough to make alot of the games really enjoyable. UT2k4 especially needs a good 30 people in a game. Which is really amazing to think of, when games of 6 on 6 used to be huge!

Web Cams
Yeah well. They kind of worked. Running more than one usb webcam seemed to cause usb to just sieze up. But beyond that that webcam application i use didnt seem to handle the high packet loss of the link. Ill play around with getting it to save locally then running some sh script to sync the local with the server, so by doing it myself i can tailor to the responsiveness of the link. If uploads sieze for more than a few seconds, just cancel and wait till next round then upload more than one image... which leads me to the other change which was to just upload new images with incremental filenames rather than overwriting the one file. its all fun though. i should stop playing with stuff like this and just buy a pc and play games...