Network setup

[Chef Brian]

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

 

[Garion]

You're on exactly the right track. You want to buy one switch with a fairly high port count as your "core" switch. Buy a bunch of other smaller switches to plug in the individual PC's. Use crossover cables to connect each of your edge switches into the core switch and then plug all the servers into the core switch as well. No need for a separate switch for the servers, just plug 'em into your core switch.

You really don't need the capabilities of a managed switch - Unmanaged should be fine. For a one-time event, you really don't need anything too fancy. You should be able to pick up a name-brand 24-port 10/100 switches for <$100. Newegg sells a D-Link for $80 for your core switch and then some 16-port switches for your edge for ~$40 each.

I'd run DHCP off of a server - Much better and easy to control and you can track who has what IP more easily.

- G

 

[Thoreau]

When LAN Central started buying hardware for our network we ran into a lot of the same questions that you did. Fortunately, I think we made a lot of good choices in hardware so far, with more on the horizon.

For a LAN of the size you are describing, depending on budget, I would consider the ideal setup to be something along the lines of:

6-7 24 port 10/100 switches for users to connect to. We have been using Dell for this and haven't had any hiccups. The switches we went with are Dell PowerConnect 2324's.
The next part has a LOT to do with your budget (as if the large chunk of change for a half dozen switches isn't enough.) If budget allows, a managed switch for the core of the network is ideal. We currently use a basic 8 port GB switch that connects to the GigE uplinks on the 2324's as the core. This has worked out well for us, but we haven't scaled up to much beyond 70 gamers yet. On that Gig switch, we connect each of the aggregation switches as well as the servers. This gives the network an effective gigabit backbone and helps alleviate a lot of the issues that come from file sharing (which WILL happen) at lan parties.

If you want to take a bit more control, and also be able to monitor the network more closely, managed is the way to go... at least for the core switch. Another local LAN group in town used all managed, but that was only because they were able to borrow the hardware from their place of employment for free. For your situation, if you think that there may be some troublemakers on the network, or extensive file sharing, go managed for the core. Otherwise, it *should* be very doable to go completely unmanaged for the entire network.

As far as DHCP is concerned, we have used a PC running Win2k server to dish out DHCP leases in the past. This seems to work pretty well and like Gario mentioned allows you to track things a lot more easily than something like a cable/dsl router would allow. If you're at all comfortable with linux, however, I would definitely use a linux based pc for this function since we have had some cases of Windows crapping out on us during events (not that linux can't do the same thing, but it has always been rock solid for our game servers.) Maybe slap up apache on the linux box as well and create an intranet page with direct (local) links to patches, antivirus, drivers, etc. that may be of use to your guests.

 

[skyking]

something running samba with a public share would be nice too. folks can put up what they want to share and not worry about somebody leeching them and hammering their connection in the middle of game play.

 

[enzoslashslash]

Nice post Thoreau, good info.

The only part of your post that I don't understand is this:

Originally posted by: Thoreau
On that Gig switch, we connect each of the aggregation switches as well as the servers. This gives the network an effective gigabit backbone and helps alleviate a lot of the issues that come from file sharing (which WILL happen) at lan parties.

Can you put that in simpler words (or be a little more discriptive?) Thanks!

 

[skyking]

imagine that you have a firehose down from that gig switch to each of the outlying aggregation switches. all the computers get hooked up with plain old garden hoses. Be sure to hook your fileserver up to the gig switch with a firehose too. With everybody pushing and pulling files from the fileserver, you need that bandwidth.

 

[Chef Brian]

Thanks for the very informative posts. I was definitely considering using a gigabit switch as the core, seeing as how file sharing is almost an accepted part of any LAN party. There will of course be rules in place saying basically no file sharing during an official tournament - but I would be naive if I thought there wouldn't be a few out of 150 who wouldn't follow that.

I've used Linux, but I'm far from what I could call "competent" with it. However, given that the time frame for this is basically late nov. to early dec., I don't imagine I will have a hard time figuring it out before then. It just so happens that my father is something of an expert on networking protocols and security, if not hardware, so I will likely take the suggestion about using a linux DHCP server and run with it.

Any other suggestions are of course appreciated

 

[Chef Brian]

EDITED: already asked this question.. Strange, no option to delete posts on this forum system. I personally the forum system, while functional, needs more updating than the main site. MHO of course