- Jul 22, 2005
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Some friends and I are planning on organizing a pretty fair sized lan party later this year, and I'm afraid I've never put together a network of this scale before, so I have some questions regarding hardware. So here's a bit of background that may or may not help answer these questions.
The gist of this is that we're trying to set up an inter-school competition (We're in our senior year of High School) for gaming. Aside from any wierd looks this may draw, we're looking at having anywhere from 100-150 attendees. There are lots of potential kinks, but the networking ones are the ones I need help with at the moment, so here goes..
This is how I'd LIKE to set up the network - the most cost effective way, by my reckoning. The layout will be divided by school - 12-14 schools, likely 10 gamers from each school.
I'd like to set up the cabling and switches as follows - have a switch for each group (ie each school, who will obviously be seated together) with all the computers from that school plugged into that switch. Then each of those switches links back to another switch at the server cluster, with the game servers being connected to that switch directly.
Will this even work?
1. Bandwidth
It stands to reason, at least in my mind, that if you can run a 64 player BF2 server over an internet connection with reasonable lag, then running it over a 10/100 network should be a breeze - but I am no expert. Will the setup mentioned above provide sufficient bandwidth, or is the one central switch going to create a bottleneck? If so, would using a gigabit switch as the central one help alleviate the bottleneck because of the increased throughput potential?
2. Managed or unmanaged?
This seems obvious to me, but I may as well ask. A network of 140 people playing Battlefield 2 constitute a fair bit of traffic and whatnot - would a managed switch be required for a network of this size? I believe they're usually used as the backbone for large corporate networks, so perhaps this is a silly question, but I figure I might as well ask.
3. DHCP - would it be better to use the central switch as the DHCP server, or to run an actual DHCP server (ie on a server computer)?
That's all I can think of for the moment. Answers appreciated and suggestions appreciated even more
-Connor
The gist of this is that we're trying to set up an inter-school competition (We're in our senior year of High School) for gaming. Aside from any wierd looks this may draw, we're looking at having anywhere from 100-150 attendees. There are lots of potential kinks, but the networking ones are the ones I need help with at the moment, so here goes..
This is how I'd LIKE to set up the network - the most cost effective way, by my reckoning. The layout will be divided by school - 12-14 schools, likely 10 gamers from each school.
I'd like to set up the cabling and switches as follows - have a switch for each group (ie each school, who will obviously be seated together) with all the computers from that school plugged into that switch. Then each of those switches links back to another switch at the server cluster, with the game servers being connected to that switch directly.
Will this even work?
1. Bandwidth
It stands to reason, at least in my mind, that if you can run a 64 player BF2 server over an internet connection with reasonable lag, then running it over a 10/100 network should be a breeze - but I am no expert. Will the setup mentioned above provide sufficient bandwidth, or is the one central switch going to create a bottleneck? If so, would using a gigabit switch as the central one help alleviate the bottleneck because of the increased throughput potential?
2. Managed or unmanaged?
This seems obvious to me, but I may as well ask. A network of 140 people playing Battlefield 2 constitute a fair bit of traffic and whatnot - would a managed switch be required for a network of this size? I believe they're usually used as the backbone for large corporate networks, so perhaps this is a silly question, but I figure I might as well ask.
3. DHCP - would it be better to use the central switch as the DHCP server, or to run an actual DHCP server (ie on a server computer)?
That's all I can think of for the moment. Answers appreciated and suggestions appreciated even more
-Connor