A small LAN party. Any tips or how to's? Help Needed

[killmeplease]

I've never set up a LAN party. Hell, I've never even been to one. I would like to set up a Quake3 LAN party for about 6 of my friends.

I already have a LAN (peer to peer) in my house with 4 pretty decent machines on it (specs below). The main switch/hub (7 port) is tucked away in the back of my basement and I have CAT5 outlets in the main basement room where I want to set things up. I have some spare 4 port switches laying around. Would it make much speed difference if I just hooked up a couple 4 port hubs to my 7 port hub via the CAT5 outlets? Or should I just disconnect that network and just use the 4 port hubs alone?

Does anybody have a site with some step by step instructions on setting up a good Quake3 server? Or is a dedicated server even neccessary?

Any tips on how you would configure?

I'm pretty new at gaming, so save the flames please.

 

[Frosty3799]

since its just a LAN you can really jsut set it up by any method: with your 7-port, or your 4-port hubs... as far as the server goes, as long as a halfway decent machine is running it, then you dont have to worry about making a dedicated server... you will all have pings of sub 20 probably, which will be fine.

also, 6 people is kinda small... like around 10 is good, or you might get bored of the same 6 people all night, since thats not much competition... also you might wanna choose another few games to play, if quake gets boring

 

[ThaGrandCow]

Couple of tips I can give:
1. Have insane ammounts of soda already there. People want to keep caffinated all night. Add beer also if you're over 21. Having a brewski or 2 makes a lan party that much more fun
2. Clip or download cupons for local pizza places before the party starts. Have the portable phone charged up.
3. Download the latest patch to all the games you are playing and either burn them to a cd or put them in a shared folder everyone has access to.
4. Find all the spare computer parts you can find and keep them accessible. Bonus points if this includes extra ethernet cards or cat 5 cables.

Thats all I can think of for now. I'm sure other people can add

 

[MustangSVT]

you might want to look at This.
it might give ya some pointers.