This is an extremely clever setup and certainly looks wonderful - but to me LAN parties are only LAN parties when people bring the computers with them (in much the same way that Champaign is only Champaign when from a certain place in France). That being said it looks wonderful and I hope it gives you and your community many years of enjoyment.
Show HN: I built a(nother) house optimized for LAN parties
161–170 of 397 posts
Re: Show HN: I built a(nother) house optimized for LAN parties
#162Given 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, you could script just your rebuilds of them in the off chance something goes south, along with maybe a disk image with the majority of common games loaded. This is just thinking along the lines it's friends and family, not the general public. I'd probably use gigabit Internet (or more) which makes updates you're missing fast, while Steam lets PCs on a LAN share updated files and save bandwidth.
Did you consider patch panels or things like PatchBox to organize those UTP cables or allow for changes in your switching later?
Re: Show HN: I built a(nother) house optimized for LAN parties
#163I salute your commitment to fun and friends, this is awesome.
Re: Show HN: I built a(nother) house optimized for LAN parties
#164Dumb question but what are you using to transfer gaming quality video and usb signal over long distance like this? I tried a fiber cable from Infinite Cables earlier this year for a similar situation but couldn’t get it quite working.
Re: Show HN: I built a(nother) house optimized for LAN parties
#165I 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.
So real. Most valuable component of this setup
Re: Show HN: I built a(nother) house optimized for LAN parties
#166Dumb question but what are you using to transfer gaming quality video and usb signal over long distance like this? I tried a fiber cable from Infinite Cables earlier this year for a similar situation but couldn’t get it quite working.
Monoprice SlimRun cables -- they have USB, DisplayPort, and HDMI. They transmit over fiber optic and seem to work just fine even at 100ft.
Re: Show HN: I built a(nother) house optimized for LAN parties
#167Given 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 that one machine I just run one command on the server and now all the machines have cloned it. At the end of the party I run one command and all the machines are reverted.
Also I can give everyone full admin access to their machine (which you sometimes need for games) and not have to worry about it, because I know it'll all be completely reverted later.
Re: Show HN: I built a(nother) house optimized for LAN parties
#168This is an extremely clever setup and certainly looks wonderful - but to me LAN parties are only LAN parties when people bring the computers with them (in much the same way that Champaign is only Champaign when from a certain place in France). That being said it looks wonderful and I hope it gives you and your community many years of enjoyment.
I thought that too originally! This is covered in the Q&A:
Re: Show HN: I built a(nother) house optimized for LAN parties
#169How did you deal with the length of the USB and display cables? I thought after 5m or so things would start falling apart. Are there active extenders and can they can handle 240+ Hz?
Not OP, but he website addresses this: https://lanparty.house/#cable-latency
Thanks, somehow I missed that entry.
Re: Show HN: I built a(nother) house optimized for LAN parties
#170I 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.
So real. Most valuable component of this setup
Yeah, it's impressive that someone built this. But the most impressive thing to me is that he has a group of friends who have been doing LAN parties together for 30 years. I can't think of anyone that I know that still does that.