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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

#181

Post by murderfs »

kentonv wrote: post #58
RulerOf wrote: post #44

> I've never heard of anyone else having done anything like this. This surprises me! But, surely, if someone else did it, someone would have told me about it? If you know of another, please let me know! I never had the tenacity to consider my build "finished," and definitely didn't have your budget, but I built a 5-player room[1] for DotA 2 back in 2013. I got really lucky with hardware selection and ended up fightin…

Hah, you really did the VM thing? A lot of people have suggested that to me but I didn't think it'd actually work. Pretty cool! Yeah I'm pretty sure my onboard 10G Marvell AQtion ethernet is the source of most of my stability woes. About half the time any of these machines boot up, Windows bluescreens within the first couple minutes, and I think it has something to do with the iSCSI service crashing. Never had troubl…

Yeah, gaming in a VM is fairly easy and reliable nowadays (the keyword to google for is VFIO). The cost savings is pretty substantial from consolidating multiple machines into one bigger machine. Unfortunately, there's an increasing number of games with anticheat that looks for being inside a VM.

> onboard 10G Marvell AQtion ethernet

I had similar problems with an Aquantia 10GbE NIC (which AQtion appears to be the rebranded name for, post-acquisition by Marvell), and it turned out to be the network chip overheating because it was poorly thermally bonded to a VRM heatsink that defaulted to turning on at something like 90C. Adding a thicker thermal pad and setting the VRM fan to always be on at 30% solved my problems.

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

#182

Post by murderfs »

kridsdale3 wrote: post #78
kentonv wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hah, you really did the VM thing? A lot of people have suggested that to me but I didn't think it'd actually work. Pretty cool! Yeah I'm pretty sure my onboard 10G Marvell AQtion ethernet is the source of most of my stability woes. About half the time any of these machines boot up, Windows bluescreens within the first couple minutes, and I think it has something to do with the iSCSI service crashing. Never had troubl…

I'm building out a 10G LAN in my house (8k VR video files are ludicrously enormous) and while it's mostly Mac, where I use Thunderbolt to SFP fiber adapters, for my Windows PC I'm looking around at what PCI options to get, and haven't pulled the trigger. If you make a decision on a 10G card (SFP or ethernet) I'd like to hear what you picked.

You can get pretty cheap 10GBASE-T NICs on ebay. I've had pretty good success with this abomination, a server-pull NIC with an HP proprietary physical interface plugged into an adapter to PCI-E: https://www.ebay.com/itm/144151881516

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

#183

Post by digitaltensor »

kentonv wrote: post #157
XCSme wrote: post #155

Random thought: would a gaming streaming service like GeForce Now achieve a similar result for a lan party? Assuming you have the network bandwidth, I am curious what the difference in input lag/quality would be, and if, when doing a blind test, anyone would notice. I guess you could even test this, by running GeForce Now on all computers vs native.

Ehh... I'm very skeptical of those streaming services. I tried Stadia once. Played Celeste. The results were very interesting. I didn't exactly perceive latency, but I did perceive that the game felt wrong . As a result, my favorite game of all time was not fun when playing on Stadia. If I didn't have the local version of the game to compare against, I would probably have blamed the game, because again, it didn't fee…

You're missing out, definitely give it a go! GeforceNow is a staggering leap over all the other previous cloud streaming services imo. The experience in Austin specifically is amazing, I get ~5ms (!) RTT latency to their datacenter in Dallas. Combine that with h/w AV1 decoding, the difference versus local is almost unperceivable.

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

#184

Post by kentonv »

murderfs wrote: post #181
kentonv wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hah, you really did the VM thing? A lot of people have suggested that to me but I didn't think it'd actually work. Pretty cool! Yeah I'm pretty sure my onboard 10G Marvell AQtion ethernet is the source of most of my stability woes. About half the time any of these machines boot up, Windows bluescreens within the first couple minutes, and I think it has something to do with the iSCSI service crashing. Never had troubl…

Yeah, gaming in a VM is fairly easy and reliable nowadays (the keyword to google for is VFIO). The cost savings is pretty substantial from consolidating multiple machines into one bigger machine. Unfortunately, there's an increasing number of games with anticheat that looks for being inside a VM. > onboard 10G Marvell AQtion ethernet I had similar problems with an Aquantia 10GbE NIC (which AQtion appears to be the re…

Interesting! I sure hope that's not my problem because I uhhh really don't want to open up 20 machines to try to fix that.

I think it probably isn't the same problem, though, because I only have stability issues at initial startup. If it boots and doesn't BSOD in the first five minutes then it's fine... even through heavy network and disk use (like installing updates).

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

#185

Post by ckmiller »

LakesAndTrees wrote: post #148

I think the thing that I’m most amazed by - and this setup is truly amazing - is the fact that you’ve got a group of friends to enjoy this with. Good for you; this looks like a blast, and I can only imagine how fun that’d be, compared to years of purely solo gaming.

Especially amazing considering that he moved from Palo Alto to Austin. Did all his friends move too?

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

#188

Post by LelouBil »

kentonv wrote: post #167
9x39 wrote: post #162

Given it's only 20 pcs, I might have just opted for fully local machines with a basic disk overlay software with exceptions for where Steam and Epic live. Course, engineering a centralized solution can be fun, but locked-down PCs are just simple. Having built corporate RDP and VDI solutions I'm just biased towards keeping things simple these days and pushing admin work off myself. Going off the local PC only idea, yo…

Hmm, that sounds like a lot more maintenance work to me. The way I have it set up, I am essentially maintaining only one PC, in a totally normal way. I update Windows by pulling up Windows Update in the control panel, etc. Since I only have to do it for one machine this is fine -- orchestrating updating 20 machines sounds like a pain. Yeah I know there are enterprise tools for this but why bother? Once I've updated t…

I meant your thing works great so good for you !

But to me it sounds harder to maintain than just wake on lan + pxe to reimage the machines before every lan party.

I think it's specifically the fact that they access their disk remotely live that's bothering me.

Why not just image it to the ssd and call it a day ?

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

#189

Post by kentonv »

ckmiller wrote: post #185
LakesAndTrees wrote: post #148

I think the thing that I’m most amazed by - and this setup is truly amazing - is the fact that you’ve got a group of friends to enjoy this with. Good for you; this looks like a blast, and I can only imagine how fun that’d be, compared to years of purely solo gaming.

Especially amazing considering that he moved from Palo Alto to Austin. Did all his friends move too?

My junior high friends that I've been having parties with for 30 years live in Minneapolis (where I grew up). They fly out for New Year's Eve each year.

But, in fact, some friends who regularly attended LAN parties in the Bay Area moved to Austin around the same time we did. And some others are also willing to travel for New Year's.

(Most parties are just local people, of course.)

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

#190

Post by Mistletoe »

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.

3/4 of Americans are overweight or obese now. We need a lot of room.
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