
Saturday, June 5. 2010
LAN for Kids: The Aftermath
Because you can’t expect to put on a large event without running into problems, and because it’s sometimes funny to hear about those problems afterwards, especially if you weren’t responsible for fixing them, I will mention our minor freak outs briefly. First we woke up to snow. Dirty, evil snow. Fortunately logistics problems had ruled out our plan for an outdoor LAN (hahaha) and we all knew how to man up so the snow didn’t slow us down. Take that Mother Nature--oh snap! We also didn’t have the internets. Well, we had wireless internet but none of the wired jacks worked. Apparently one of the internet trucks broke down in the internet tubes. We thought Steam games might be a lost cause because even though we were hosting our own servers we still had to make an initial login to Steam to host the game. Then, out of nowhere, Kevin swooped in like a ninja and bridged his laptop’s wireless connection, plugged it into the router and BAM, internet for all! Kevin also set up some sweet traffic shaping so our network performed like a champion and a boss. Kevin saved the day, many thanks Kevin! Also big thanks to Ian Nicklin who helped with setup and game hosting on his personal super computer and Peter Nix who also helped with hosting and setup, you guys rule!
The gaming rocked! Games from 20 years ago are the best. We played some huge Quake 3 games, a StarCraft 1 game, a little Left4Dead and finished off the night with Team Fortress 2. Some guys brought an Xbox with Street Fighter and an arcade control pad and played it on the projector. It was RAD. I bought WAY too much pizza. On the up side it meant everyone got (was forced) to take some pizza home at the end of the night. The event ended just before midnight. Unfortunately during all the craziness I completely forgot to bring my camera, so no pictures this time, but trust me, the setup was beautiful and epic and beautifully epic.
Raffle Winners:
XKCD comic signed by Richard Stallman – Chris Webster
John Belushi Print –
1 Hour Massage – Erin Snyder
Wii Guitar Hero Controller – Ian Nicklin’s boss
Overall I/we had an amazing time and I can’t wait to run another. In fact I will be trying to put together some additional equipment so we can have a complete LAN kit in house and we could potentially host smaller events once every month or two. I did learn a couple of things and I think future events will be much cheaper ($5 or possibly free) and we will sell the food and drink. We also need to find some cheaper space but I’m pretty sure we can work that out. Thanks again to everyone that donated, helped, came or just generally supported us, we really appreciated it!
Boring logistical stuff:
The tough part in hosting LAN parties is that there are
actually some non-trivial costs for each additional person that attends. Each person needs a decent amount of table, a
chair, three or so outlets, a port on a preferably gigabit switch, CAT 5 to the
switch, long CAT 5 from each table switch to a central switch which needs to be
a fairly large gigabit switch. Fortunately
each piece of that equation is a one-time cost.
Unfortunately renting a large space can be relatively expensive compared
to the number of people the space can host times the amount of money we can
reasonably charge them to get in, especially if we want some of that money to
go to a charity. If I can get the
equipment we will be able to host approximately 50-60 people. Fifty or sixty people are all we could
reasonably fit into the Homewood Suites ballroom. I went to nearly every big rental space in