Back in the early- to mid-2000s, I used to frequent a yearly recurring LAN party ("Hobslan") for up to some 100 people hosted in Germany, about 1300km away from my home. Of course, my midi tower PC that was specifically geared towards attending LAN parties was riding with me on the train(s) going there, and after a refreshing 14 to 18h trip (depending on the year's train schedule and my monitor-and-ride-providing German buddy (thanks, Han! :)) giving me the last-200-mile lift to the proper place), it arrived with me in all its glory: A Pentium 4 "Northwood" 2.6GHz (overclocked to 3.5GHz) on an ABIT AB-AI7 motherboard, a Geforce 4 4200 Ti AGP-based GPU with 64MB of VRAM, 512MB of dual-channel DDR-SDRAM at a frequency I cannot remember, and, of course, my trusty 160GB RAID0(!) SATA HDD array to store all the things you could leech on the sweet, sweet Fast Ethernet (100Mbps) fully-switched LAN that I was going to plug this thing into! The little beast had Gentoo Linux installed, and its hardware was perfectly balanced to provide that highly sought-after stable 125fps (where a certain physics bug in the game engine allowed for maximum jumping distance) under all possible conditions in Quake ]|[ Arena ;)
The events were a blast, and even the tournaments I did majorly suck at (playing Super Street Fighter II Turbo on an original SNES, hooked up to a projector that illuminated pretty much all of one of the walls of the school gym that the event took place in, for example) are forever etched into my memory.
One year, the network was plagued by the infamous W32.Blaster worm, and most of the Windows-based machines the local admins had provided fell to it in short order. People were starting to get desperate - most of their gameservers and DC++ hubs AWOL or even FUBAR, and many were going through the motions of redoing the Windows XP setup left an right, only to see their machines becoming infected again on the first network-enabled boot-up. It was mayhem, and a weekend of pure Quake awesomeness was threatened to be reduced to a week of reciting FCKGW-... from (muscle) memory ad nauseam. Luckily, my Gentoo machine was invulnerable to that particular problem, and my little gaming beast ended up on a separate network segment for "vetted", provden-clean Windows machines only, providing FTP and several Quake ][ and Quake ]|[ game servers at the same time for those who HAD machines that still worked, or were brought back from the dead. I even saved a relevant screenshot from back then as a cherished digital artifact: https://coloss.us.to/blaster.jpg
Makes me smile whenever I happen to revisit it :)
