MarchLAN

MarchLAN

First at St Marys

Dates: 10am - 10pm 10th of March 2001
Venue: St Marys Memorial Hall
Attendance : 85 / 90

Photos


Overview

BONG's 10th public LAN party was held on the 10th of March 2001
10 - 10 at St Marys Memorial Hall. With a turn out of over 80 people
things went very smoothly!

Finny Review

The Hall:-
The new hall which is called St Mary's Memorial Hall or something, is alot better than phs for various reasons, we don't have to setup the tables!!! =) council do it for us, which is a real bonus, it is alot more spacious and will see us over the 200 lanners mark, it has big fans to keep the air moving, it has a big double door fridge for us to keep drinks etc in, toilets and things were decent, being alot bigger than phs. There was easily ample parking space, and it wasn't a very long walk down to Hungry Jacks or McDonalds which seemed to be the preffered choice for food.. so yeah I'd have to say the new hall is a good one.

POWER:-
Things went alot smoother this LAN, after a few initiall hickups due to some earth leakage. We don't know exactly what is causing this as we arn't all power freaks, but it was more than likley a spike caused by someone plugging in, or the power cabling isn't of as good a quality as it states, so we are upgrading all the white power cabling to new 15A cabling, which will remove the second problem if it is true, and also as it has a higher amperage, it should be able to takes spikes a little better (ie the initial burst of power needed when turning on a computer). We are also going to put in some more safety switches and trial if they actually do anything, so a row will be protected by individual safety switches which should help also... anyway back to what happened at the LAN

IntraLAN:-
As I ran it off my computer this time around, it flew like nothing else *grin* thats why you have an athlon with 512mb ram =) so yeah it was running alot faster for everyone that used it, it seems alot of people are still scared to use it, as I only enabled about 50 acounts on it, but none the less once we got the music pumping through the hall all was going good on that front, and I think people used it to run the Rocket Arena 3 comp but I could be wrong. If your sitting there going Intralan, what was that? well it is out little LAN website thing (not too little anymore) which for you is a place to get the latest files, vote for music on the jukebox, and sign up for tournaments.

Projector:-
Boy did that look mad!!! Thanks Penrith City Library!!! I enjoyed playing with this baby all day, showing up some of my girlfriends until I learnt it had a zoom function, but still, it allowed us to show soom good visualization plugins for the jukebox running off IntraLAN, and show some stupid shockwave flash things curtosy of Kaboom. We will have the regulary at our lans now, and next time around well put a big white sheet hanging from the top of the stage, making it more centralised for everyone and giving it a better surface to project onto.

Tournaments:-
We didn't really run any except for Rocket Arena 3 as we didn't have the time to organise them, but on the other hand we ran a heap of different game servers to try and promote some new mods etc, as imho entering a cs tournament every lan would get so boring its not funny, but some of you enjoy it so it'll be back next lan... Anwyay I belive splint, and friends won the Rocket Arena 3 comp, winning some very cool joystick from logitech, and one of the pro l33t h4x0r optical mice.

Servers:-
Thanks to NMC (Nepean Micro Computers) we had once again two very beefy servers that catered for all your halflife needs, and ran a DM UT server for some time aswell... running Halflife DM, TFC, CS, DOD, SI and FLF there would have been something new for you to try... Thanks to WolfGang for providing a UT server on which he knows how to install mods, stupid me needing to learn how to do that... I don't know why Russels WinNT box wasn't there but that was going to run the Rocket Arena 3 Server... but anyway, I don't think it mattered too much as you were all playing CS, UT: Tactical OPS, or Aq2...

Conclusion:-
I think thats about it, so I would like to thank our four main sponsors NetGear, Logitech, Planet Netcom, and Nepean Micro Computers for their wonderful contributions to us, and without them we wouldn't be where we are today. I would aslo like to thank Carnage for running Rocket Arena 3 tournament, and helping pack up at the end of the day, The Insider for helping setup, run around for us and help pack up at the end, The Bala guys that were there to help setup, and Intruder and his mate for helping setup at the begininng of the day. The efforts of these people is invaluable to the success of bong, thanks alot guys!!

Anyway go Sign-up for FragFest3, and our next event Lanarama which will be an even bigger and better LAN than MarchLAN!!!

- Finny