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Show HN: I built a(nother) house optimized for LAN parties

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Re: Show HN: I built a(nother) house optimized for LAN parties

#121

Post by kentonv »

asn007 wrote: post #110

That's a sweet LAN setup you've got! The only few things that rub me the wrong way is the choice of peripherals and the lack of headsets. Must be pretty noisy in here! The tabletops also seems a bit too thin and wiggly for my taste, but, honestly, for LAN parties with chill people you personally know — it's ok As for the actual host setup with a singular disk image — great job! LAN gaming centres do something similar…

I'm curious, what are the popular products/solutions that LAN centers use for this?

I ended up putting together my own thing. I saw various products that seemed like they might be what I wanted but they always seemed... sketchy.

Re: Show HN: I built a(nother) house optimized for LAN parties

#122

Post by kentonv »

laidoffamazon wrote: post #109
compiler-devel wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It truly is embarrassing. Imagine seeing something and thinking, "how can I get the government to forcefully take some of that for my benefit?"

It’s not for my benefit, I just want to see Stanford grads get punished. I could get more punitive but I keep that for yelling at strangers in person.

Where did the Stanford thing come from? I went to the University of Minnesota.

Re: Show HN: I built a(nother) house optimized for LAN parties

#123

Post by findyourexit »

What an incredible setup! Really wonderful house overall, to be honest.

Aside from all of the extremely epic technology and whatnot - I have got to say, the elevated view and outlook of your place is sensational. Congratulations on putting together such a terrific place to raise a family.

Oh and worth mentioning; I sincerely appreciated and enjoyed reading your comprehensive Q&A section beyond the images (which themselves, had really awesome annotations included). Thanks for sharing!

Re: Show HN: I built a(nother) house optimized for LAN parties

#124

Post by kentonv »

TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #112
kentonv wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly I've never felt it made any difference to me when gaming. I would never code on such a keyboard but for the old WASD it seems fine. That said, guests are welcome to bring any peripherals they want. There's a USB hub at each station to plug stuff in.

I guess it depends on what sort of games you're playing, but isn't it possible for the lack of n-key rollover to be a problem? My understanding is that many of these keyboards fail to register inputs if too many keys are pressed at the same time.

Hmm, I've never had an issue with this.

We generally don't play competitively but we do play fast-paced FPS and such and I just don't recall this ever having come up. (We had the same keyboards in the last house FWIW.)

Re: Show HN: I built a(nother) house optimized for LAN parties

#125

Post by kentonv »

devenson wrote: post #103
kentonv wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The cat room fans are standard bathroom fans. At present we just leave them on all the time -- you can see the switches taped down in the photos. I suppose it might be a good idea to rig up a sensor...

Constant fans are sucking outside air into your house. Could be part of your Heat/AC efficiency problem mentioned in your post. A timer to run every 10th minute would be a simple improvement.

Yeah that's a good point, I should turn off the fans for a day and see if it changes the power use...

Re: Show HN: I built a(nother) house optimized for LAN parties

#126

Post by tim-- »

kentonv wrote: post #101
tim-- wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you thought about using Clonezilla and broadcasting out an image using PXE boot? Would completely bypass the iSCSI setup, and each machine would still get the latest image from your server before the lan party begins.

A really neat thing about the netboot setup is it takes zero time to clone the image to all the machines. As soon as I'm done installing updates on one machine, I shut down, run one command that completes instantly, and now I can boot all the machines immediately with that image. There have been a decent number of times when I actually did this during a party to fix an issue, or between parties just to keep the machi…

With multicast, you only need to send the image once to all 20 machines. With 10 gig Ethernet, a 1tb image should be sent in approx 15 minutes.

Also, maybe having a steam cache server and using the local disks as a game store might help with installation of games?

Definitely can see the benefits of the netboot setup, though!

Re: Show HN: I built a(nother) house optimized for LAN parties

#128

Post by stevage »

Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #100
stevage wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The noise of a room full of mechanical keyboards, dear god. Me, I bought a mechanical keyboard but I despise it. Switched to a Logitech Keys.

Not all mechanical keyboards are noisy. I use TTC Silent Bluish White switches which produce a muted "thock" sound, rather than the loud "clickety-clack" that you're probably thinking of. They're only slightly louder than a typical membrane keyboard.

True. Only 98% of mechanical keyboards are noisy.

Re: Show HN: I built a(nother) house optimized for LAN parties

#129

Post by maccard »

valzam wrote: post #61
syntaxing wrote: post #41

> Jade and I needed a bigger house, but we really could not afford to buy (much less build) anything bigger in Palo Alto. I’m really surprised about this, really shows how ludicrous the housing market is in the Bay Area. How high does your income need to be to afford a bigger house?!

Also considering 1400 sq ft (130 sq m) too small to raise a family is peak American... That's bigger than 99.9% of apartments people live in in Europe and raise a family just fine.

I live in what would be considered a large house in the UK and it’s marginally larger than that!

Re: Show HN: I built a(nother) house optimized for LAN parties

#130

Post by solardev »

That's frigging awesome!! I really admire the thought and attention to detail that went into this. Must've cost a good fortune, but what better way to spend it having fun? Your friends seem like a blast too.

And also, thanks for Cloudflare Workers :) One of my favorite tech tools of all time.

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