LAN Party set up?

[mjs22]

I am getting ready to run a LAN party for about 50 people. We are going to be playing UT2K3 and MOH-Spearhead. I am running my servers on dual 1GHz machines ran into 4-16 port 10/100 Dell switches. Should I upgrade to gigabyte LAN ,install a second NIC into each server, or just run off of the single 10/100 NIC that is presently in both servers?

BTW....Both server machines are running Win XP Pro.

 

[Mavtech]

For that many people, Gigabit LAN would be sweet. You are talking a pretty penny though. Everything has to be Gigabit to take advantage of the 1000 Mbps speeds. If you have one device between the server and one of the computers that is 10/100, it will slow it down. I want to upgrade my network to Gigabit LAN too. My server and my main PC already have Gigabit NICs in them. Now, I have to get a Gigabit switch and some cable.

 

[onelin]

I help run a LAN of comparable size to yours and some of our servers are still 10/100. I'm not the one who brings the boxes, so I'm not sure how the split is between them...I will say that we're working towards gigabit (we have a lot of gigabit dell equipment) but aren't entirely there.

One LAN we had the servers on an 8 port gigabit switch stacked on top of a switch that all the other switches ran to (for traffic reasons)...last time we didn't do that and I don't think there was any difference at all. We've had very large BF1942 games (40-60 players) with no problems.

Honestly, you'll be fine. Game traffic is well within the bounds of 10/100 and will be for a while. If you have the money and have fileservers also, you may want to start hunting for the heck of it... but wait until you find something with a decent price. One thing everyone thought was cool was setting up all my UT2k3 servers to point to the fileserver (http) to download maps. A box like that you may want gigabit.

Don't forget about looking for sponsors, that's always an option for equipment.

 

[skyking]

gigE would only help for the filesharing aspect of the party, and it would not help too much if you did not have some fast drives/arrays on the server end.
All the games are engineered to run over dialup <not well, I know>, so even 10mbit on hubs works well up to a point, say 5 or 6 users. You'll do fine.

 

[Cheetah8799]

You won't need gigabit for the games.

Games like SoF2 and CoD use about 3 - 4 KBps for each user for download at the server. Upload to the server per user is less. I doubt any games you play will use much more than 5 KBps per user.

So if I run a server for 32 people, thats maybe 160KBps, or 1280kbps. And if your network is 100mbps, then the games will only use about 1.3% of your network bandwidth at the server for download, and probably 1% or less for uploads at the server.

As for the game server speed, I've noticed on mine that the only time the server really does any work is when changing maps. If you're going to run multiple game servers at a time, I would suggest with that many users that you have a different box for each game server instance.

For reference, I ran SoF2 on a AMD XP1600+ with 512mb PC2100 ram and 20gb 7200rpm drive and WinXP Pro. It ran perfect with about 20 users, loaded levels very fast, and in general worked perfect.

If you're worried about bandwidth during the lan party, you may want to run Bandwidth Monitor Pro on your servers. You can get a 30day trial for free. WinXP has a network bandwidth tool built in also.

 

[HKSturboKID]

another point is on the game server, make sure no one is using that to play the game as well. It will really slow things down.

 

[skyking]

Originally posted by: HKSturboKID
another point is on the game server, make sure no one is using that to play the game as well. It will really slow things down.

When does that apply? if i have a limited number of computers and want to play Quake3, for example, will it be OK to play on the server when I have 6 or 7 players??

 

[onelin]

Originally posted by: skyking

Originally posted by: HKSturboKID
another point is on the game server, make sure no one is using that to play the game as well. It will really slow things down.

When does that apply? if i have a limited number of computers and want to play Quake3, for example, will it be OK to play on the server when I have 6 or 7 players??

it applies to people hosting LANs and larger games mainly. If you have a few buddies over, sure, run a listen server.

 

[HKSturboKID]

Originally posted by: skyking

Originally posted by: HKSturboKID
another point is on the game server, make sure no one is using that to play the game as well. It will really slow things down.

When does that apply? if i have a limited number of computers and want to play Quake3, for example, will it be OK to play on the server when I have 6 or 7 players??

Well, I run a CS lan party and have about 7 people over on my AMD 2100, 512MB Harddrive. I then use the server to plan and it lags the server.

 

[HKSturboKID]

Originally posted by: skyking

Originally posted by: HKSturboKID
another point is on the game server, make sure no one is using that to play the game as well. It will really slow things down.

When does that apply? if i have a limited number of computers and want to play Quake3, for example, will it be OK to play on the server when I have 6 or 7 players??

Well, I run a CS lan party and have about 7 people over. I hosted the game on my AMD 2100, 512mb ram and then I use the server to play and it lags the game.