So I’m 20 and the director of IT for my University’s Gaming club. I was hired over the summer and we’re doing something cool this semester!
Previously our club would have 2 LANs per semester but they started declining in activity in the past yeat. When we had a major staff turnover(including my hiring) we decided that we would do 1 big LAN every semester from here on out.
I am in charge of event network setup for the LAN and I’m making do with the admittedly pretty decent hardware owned by the club. We have 2, 24 port 10gbe Dell 6224 switches from over a decade ago as well as one or two unmanaged 24 port gigabit switches and a large handful of cheap TPLink 8 port gigabit switches.
The auditorium we are holding this in on campus has 3 single gigabit drops with loop prevention that shuts down drops when it detects loops.
So my plan:
We are going to use each of the 3 drops independently. For games tournaments we will have an unmanaged 24 port switch connected to 3 octa-port switches for local connectivity on either side. (Overwatch and CS2 could have a tourney going at the same time) The center of the room drop will be connected to our Dell 6224s and to our host machine*.
What I’ve accomplished:
Made an inventory
*Set up a lancache with a 10gbe SFP+ card connected to our host machine with a Ryzen 5 5600 and with a decently fast gen 4 nvme drive(cant remember model rn)
So we’re going to be minimizing the number of problems with bandwidth limitation in the room using a lancache to locally cache and distribute games without needing to hit upstream.
Unfortunately campus sucks and the room in question is almost always locked, but every individual piece works correctly. The event is this saturday starting at Noon! When I get there at 9:30 in the morning and set up everything I’ll just have to hope to whatever higher power there may be that everything just works.
So, where I live there’s not a lot of jobs opening for IT and networking. The vast majority is programming, cybersecurity, data science, etc. The last two I’m not opposed to as I am getting my degree for them but my real passion is Network Engineering(I’m getting my certs too). Is this a good path for me? Is there anything more I should be doing? How valuable would this kind of thing really be on a resume considering the jobs I want to apply to?
When I used to help with a LAN we had 3x Quanta LB4M’s (yay!), 6x Avaya 4548GT’s (not great…) and later on a Mikrotik Router and two Mikrotik APs. “Core” network was between the Quantas with 10G fiber links, from the Quantas we had 3x1G Link-Aggregation to the Avaya switches. This was done so the longest cable attendees had to bring was 5m (~15ft), a bit of a pain to run all the copper between the switches.
The Mikrotik Router had a single 1G uplink to the university, resulted in double-NAT but kept our somewhat isolated from disturbing the every-day operations.
I always wanted to but never got round to doing that.
Steam download-sharing has now made that somewhat obsolete for small events where you can ask people to turn that on.
wireshark the tourney if you have an extra machine lying around
you’d be surprised how much malware is on the average gaming computer
definitely do this
don’t need someone fiddle fucking the campus network
You can setup a pfsense box with a pair of 4 port ethernet cards for load balancing and DHCP between switches
Most have loopback protection so run 10 gig between each switch to lighten the load across the pfsense box
without interlinks, your traffic between switches will all be pushed upstream
to prevent loopback from the drops, use the pfsense box to isolate upstream from the LAN party
just takes 1 person plugging a cable between any 2 switches to turn off 2 of your uplinks.
Thanks for this!
I will most likely have wireshark on my laptop for monitoring during the event. As for NAT, the inside of the auditorium has NAT to the rest of the building which is also NAT-ted to the campus-wide network. Even we have trouble just doing what we need to for setup and getting DHCP addresses for devices on the wired network unless you’ve specifically reserved something ahead of time is almost impossible.
Your comment about the pfsense box, I need to look into this more but I don’t have access to anything except the user-facing drops in the auditorium where the event is taking place. From what I was told, as soon as the network detects that two drops have access to each other they will be disabled and need manual re-initialization. We may not even have time to configure anything before our access is locked.
I think for this event we’ll just be doing our three separate networks as I do not really want to risk it. However I’ll keep that in mind for next semester’s LAN and see if I can experiment with it while I have more runway for the next event.
Our problems actually weren’t due to anything networking, our lan network architecture worked well and the docker container lancache was good. We keot having our servers go down however due to the UPS they were plugged into. That model of UPS apparently had power leak issues and we later measured a 50v output from the ports HAHAHA.
I got shocked quite a bit the day of the LAN trying to figure out what was going on. I thought we just had something shorted or that the switches werent grounded properly after a decade of probably improper storage.
Anyways the power thing was actually causing our network setup to go down every 2 hours or so until we figured it out, but I’d still say the event was a success because we were able to get through all the tournaments with relatively few problems as well as ~240 people showed up!
I have personally organised 4 high School lan patries (around 30-50 particitipants) and now that I moved to the university I might be organising one of a simular size. I already talked to my local infosec/cybersec association and they are villing to loan us some swithces (maybe even 2960X if one company does end up donating those).
The biggest problem for us is that the university really doesn’t allow us to do overnight events with people actually staying on campus for the whole time.
Down the road you probably get a second drive and put in a raid setup in case one dies during your events and for even better performance. I’d also look into adding more space to this machine especially since it’s a cache server and I’m guessing the game selection is going to be rotating.
Raid 1 is definitely in the cards for future LANs, I believe the drive purchased was a solidigm p41 plus 2tb.
We are not likely to need higher capacity storage though, as we are largely caching only a dozen or so of the most popular esports titles and rhythm games. Osu, Overwatch, CS2, Rocket League, LoL, etc.
No worries … Extra room / storage is just a default recommendation especially as game sizes grow and what you may or may not be playing 2 - 6+ years down the road!
somewhat isolated from disturbing the every-day operations.
This really helps.