Network Report From SpaceLAN

Hello from your LAN All Night networking team! We were particularly excited this year as our BYOC network was utilizing almost all new-to-us hardware. We wanted to take a moment to recognize some folks who came through with some nice donations that let us enhance your experience at our gaming festival, as well as share how well things worked! 

Halestorm was able to donate a Ubiquiti Dream Machine Pro to serve as our new router and security camera DVR. Skaboy got his hands on and donated almost twenty Aruba S3500 48 port + 10 gig switches to us, allowing us to deploy 10 gig connections to the BYOC and stage areas. Everything connected to our new core switch, a Cisco Nexus 93180, so amazingly donated to us by Coral! On top of that the cache server was connected with a 40 gigabit connection, making certain that there would never be a bottleneck for anyone to download a game they wanted to play that we had ready to go.

Skaboy came through with even more hardware for us! He donated a Dell R610 server and an MD 3000 DAS for us to use. We utilized it this past event as a media storage server for our still and moving pixel masters. He also brought a Dell tower server running as a hypervisor that provided several LAN hosted gaming servers for your enjoyment. (If there are any missing game servers you want to see at L for LANdetta, please let us know!) The server also hosted an instance of LANager, giving everyone on the intranet a simple place to find and connect to game servers, see what games were being played (by logged in players), as well as see our schedule of events. 

Our BYOC attendees threw around a lot of network packets in three days! The Great Wolf Lodge’s network connection performed flawlessly, giving everyone a solid internet experience the entire event. Our cache server recorded downloading 2.25 terabytes of new game downloads and served up 4.82 terabytes to y’all, saving y’all from having to download over 2.5 TB of games at slower speeds! On top of that, the five switches in the BYOC alone handled an aggregate total of almost 15 TB of data – and that’s only measuring what traveled along the fiber! 

We want to thank everyone for attending and we hope you had as much fun as we did! Please do not hesitate to ask us questions or make suggestions for how we can make your LAN experience better at future events. We want to make you lugging your machines down here to be worth every second!