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LAN Party Topology (Help)

K

killnine

Member
Hey guys,

I have a Netgear Fast Ethernet Switch (FS116) that has 16 ports.

Now I am looking to make a 30+ person LAN party and I am worried about networking.

I dont want to use routers with my switch because I think their routing tables are going to get F'd, you know? So....I am asking the following:


If I drop some cash on a 24-port Netgear Switch (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...2E16833122033), can I plug my internet connection into this 24-port, and then have a port go into my OTHER 16-port switch? Will that be kosher?

Then I would just have people connect to the two switches as it is convenient.

Will this work? I need an experienced networking guy(or gal) here because 30 happy people will be riding on this working. (+reps)
 
main issue I see is that all traffic between the switches will go over a single 100meg port. for most gaming you should be ok but I know when I run my lan parties people like to share files as well as game. That could be a disaster with 30 people and only 100meg between a large portion of them.
 
Hrm, is there any way to alleviate this? I cannot possibly afford anything higher than a 100Mbit switch. What kind of topology would be affordably useful? Like, a gigabit switch (4-port) that branches to the 24-port and 16-port? But I mean, I think the fastest each would work is 200Mbit from the switch to the Gb-switch.

I did warn about bringing patche games, and avoiding (legal) file transfers on my site. I downright banned illegal music/game/OS transfers.... but I am sure that wont mean a damn thing come event day.
 
There isn't anything you can do about the 100Mbps bottleneck. You don't have managed switches so you can't trunk ports and you can't simply plug two pairs of ports together otherwise you'll end up with a broadcast storm. And yoru switches will probably run "200Mbits" between switches regardless of gigabit or not.

And I presume that by router you actually mean a SOHO router (like a Linksys WRT54GL, for example). An unmanaged switch won't do a thing to the "routing tables" in one of these. Not to mention you get a DHCP server which will make life much easier for 30 clients.
 
Well thats good. So besides the initial bottleneck, hopefully IPs wil be divee'd out.

If the network goes to crap, the attendees have no one to blame but themselves. Still, i will attempt to moderate what is going on at the event.
 
Good idea RebateMonger

I can also have game patches and stuff on an external hard drive that can be passed around. The host of the event has free anti-virus to hand out if anyone wants it. So we can only hope that "passing disks" isn't like passing used needles. =P

THanks so much for the comments so far, guys. Great points, all of you.

Hopefully a managed 48-port switch will just fall in my lap between now and June. =)
 
You could also designate two PCs (one connected to each of the two main switches) as "servers" and copy the most-popular patches to both of the "servers". That'll keep traffic off that one shared 100Mbps link between the two main switches.
 
Unfortunately, I dont even have enough game servers. I cant possibly hope to scrounge up two more machines as dedicated fileservers.

*tear*

Anyone got a machine or two to donate for a day in June for a Milwaukee LAN party?
 
Why do you need dedicated file servers all of a sudden? I thought you wanted to avoid that situation.

I don't know what games you will play a but any decent server should be able to run at least 2-3 games simultaneously. You could probably just have the server with the lesser load be the file server if you need to.
 
Right now, all I have is a 3000+ AMD A64 with a gig of ram and a single hard drive. I am sure the hard disk would be the greatest cause of problems with multiple servers on the one computer.

My other computer, which I was going to use as a teamspeak server is a 1.8Ghz pentium 3 with 256megs of DDR@333 (PC2100). I dont think any new game today could have a good server experience on this. However, it may work as a fileserver. Neither are stellar machines.

I am pretty sure the two official games are going to be UT2004 and CS:S. Any RTS will be hosted by the contestants.


QUESTION: Is there any possibilty of me "overexerting" a router? I have a decent D-Link router and its always been great, but with all this traffic, is it just going to get swamped? Does that happen?

 
Originally posted by: killnine
Right now, all I have is a 3000+ AMD A64 with a gig of ram and a single hard drive. I am sure the hard disk would be the greatest cause of problems with multiple servers on the one computer.

My other computer, which I was going to use as a teamspeak server is a 1.8Ghz pentium 3 with 256megs of DDR@333 (PC2100). I dont think any new game today could have a good server experience on this. However, it may work as a fileserver. Neither are stellar machines.

I am pretty sure the two official games are going to be UT2004 and CS:S. Any RTS will be hosted by the contestants.


QUESTION: Is there any possibilty of me "overexerting" a router? I have a decent D-Link router and its always been great, but with all this traffic, is it just going to get swamped? Does that happen?
Click to expand...

As long as they're not trading files all over the place, you shouldn't have any issues.

Good idea on the AV - you might even want to make a mandatory "boot up with a Live CD and run an AV check" before you give them a network cable to avoid problems.

Oh, and nitpick - DDR333 = PC2700 😉

- M4H
 
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