Lan Party Questions

[arkhile]

Ok heres my slew of questions for hosting a lan party

1. How much is a general cost for electricity, I am trying to host a 30-40 man lan, and when i paid for an electrician to come out he wanted about 300-400 and said it was 60 or so bucks for each breaker/circuit i forget, anyways tell me what an avg estimage for 30-40 computers would be around.

2.Say i do want to have internet at my lan, the most feasible thing i can think of is to use a proxy server BUT, are there any programs that limit the speed per client, I want 10kb per client for the proxy server only, so they can check email etc or get on irc? and not download hefty files or play on servers outside the lan.

3. What do you think of this setup, 1 gigabit switch 4-8 port for the servers, and 100mb switches for the lan, would this be good? also what are some good brands to use that are cheap and work the best, best bang for the buck.

4. when running the servers, for my own protection against viruses do you think running a software firewall on each machine would be wise? ie zone alarm pro on each box, i know it may cause some complications

5. Also whats a rule of thumb for servers and ram usage, and do you think some new laptops be able to be servers? right now i have amd xp with 512mb ram for file server, i got another laptop thats 2.4 ghz 512mb ram i could use for server, and prolly build and setup another 3rd server, for running game servers, is 1gb really necessary if i am only running 1 single game server on each box? and if i want to run 2 game servers or more, how much ram should be sufficient? and how many game servers should i be able to run on each box flawlessly.

My current location is a hotel conference room, they want 100 a night for the conf room, its adjacent to the front desk its completely away from all the rooms so noise isnt much of an issue except during the day for the front desk.
I want to start off small with this 30-40 player lan and move onto bigger ones, I think getting one of those gigantic tin buildings would be good for a lan building of 100 players, heating and air would be a big issue though.

<font color=red><b><i>The boy that you love is the man that you fear. </font color=red></b></i>

 

[Flagg7771234]

Wow, I can help with the electricity...

First question: I am not an electrician but a gammer in my LAN party is. I have nothing to support these statements but I have seen them applied for more than 30 lans and we have never had a power issue.

For 10 PCs assumed they have a normal monitor and a 500wat PSU we use one breaker 30amp with a powerstrip of 8 outlets. The cable has felt to be hot one time but this was becouse there was 5 22" NEC monitors on them and there was also found to be one of thoes small iceboxes under the table. You run a 12g line to a spliter 14g to 2 boxes with 4 outlets, one long table row, repeat this for the other tables.

Follow your power back, We have a 100amp service (backplain) that plugs directly into the main box with a 100amp breaker. The cable is 10g so it is heavy and thick. We run up to 17 30amp breakers off of our "portable" box.

The design is simple, but you will need to get a real electrician to plug the 100amp sercvie into the main box before and after the lan setup. Since we have someone we do not pay for this, but your looking at probably $50 to $100 for a guy to come out and do this for ya.

Your portable box setup might run you as high as $150 with cable and all. Ours was $1400, we modded a rackmount case with lights to show it off

Hope this helps
kevin

Flagg CNE MCSE CCNA

 

[Flagg7771234]

Internet at your lan.. What we do is block all ports except for thoes that we want up, like yahoo IM, internet browsing, macafee and norton autoupdate ports, and a few others.

The basics would be allowing port 25,80,110,443 these will allow most emails and web browsing. Also yahoo IM. Not sure if a cheap dlink or linksys will do this, we have a cisco 2611 that we can block from either direction ports. BUT! a skilled user can get edonkey to function on these ports, so this is not full proof. However if you get an expensive router AND you have dhcp serving your IPs you can see what address is sucking all the bandwidth and go have a chat with the offender!

Hope this helped

Flagg CNE MCSE CCNA