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Show HN: I built a(nother) house optimized for LAN parties

(lanparty.house)
1071 points kentonv | 5 comments | 16 Nov 24 15:52 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source

I wasn't quite sure if this qualified as "Show HN" given you can't really download it and try it out. However, dang said[0]:

> If it's hardware or something that's not so easy to try out over the internet, find a different way to show how it actually works—a video, for example, or a detailed post with photos.

Hopefully I did that?

Additionally, I've put code and a detailed guide for the netboot computer management setup on GitHub:

https://github.com/kentonv/lanparty

Anyway, if this shouldn't have been Show HN, I apologize!

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22336638

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RulerOf ◴[16 Nov 24 20:56 UTC] No.42159254[source]▶
> I've never heard of anyone else having done anything like this. This surprises me! But, surely, if someone else did it, someone would have told me about it? If you know of another, please let me know!

I never had the tenacity to consider my build "finished," and definitely didn't have your budget, but I built a 5-player room[1] for DotA 2 back in 2013.

I got really lucky with hardware selection and ended up fighting with various bugs over the years... diagnosing a broken video card was an exercise in frustration because the virtualization layer made BSODs impossible to see.

I went with local disk-per-VM because latency matters more than throughput, and I'd been doing iSCSI boot for such a long time that I was intimately familiar with the downsides.

I love your setup (thanks for taking the time to share this BTW) and would love to know if you ever get the local CoW working.

My only tech-related comment is that I will also confirm that those 10G cards are indeed trash, and would humbly suggest an Intel-based eBay special. You could still load iPXE (I assume you're using it) from the onboard NIC, continue using it for WoL, but shift the netboot over to the add-in card via a script, and probably get better stability and performance.

[1]: https://imgur.com/a/4x4-four-desktops-one-system-kWyH4

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kentonv ◴[16 Nov 24 21:14 UTC] No.42159408[source]▶
Hah, you really did the VM thing? A lot of people have suggested that to me but I didn't think it'd actually work. Pretty cool!

Yeah I'm pretty sure my onboard 10G Marvell AQtion ethernet is the source of most of my stability woes. About half the time any of these machines boot up, Windows bluescreens within the first couple minutes, and I think it has something to do with the iSCSI service crashing. Never had trouble in the old house where the machines had 1G network -- but load times were painful.

Luckily if the machines don't crash in the first couple minutes, then they settle down and work fine...

Yeah I could get higher-quality 10G cards and put them in all the machines but they seem expensive...

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1. kridsdale3 ◴[16 Nov 24 21:55 UTC] No.42159687[source]▶
I'm building out a 10G LAN in my house (8k VR video files are ludicrously enormous) and while it's mostly Mac, where I use Thunderbolt to SFP fiber adapters, for my Windows PC I'm looking around at what PCI options to get, and haven't pulled the trigger.

If you make a decision on a 10G card (SFP or ethernet) I'd like to hear what you picked.

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2. murderfs ◴[17 Nov 24 02:17 UTC] No.42161446[source]▶
You can get pretty cheap 10GBASE-T NICs on ebay. I've had pretty good success with this abomination, a server-pull NIC with an HP proprietary physical interface plugged into an adapter to PCI-E: https://www.ebay.com/itm/144151881516
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3. timc3 ◴[17 Nov 24 05:44 UTC] No.42162248[source]▶
If its SFP then intel, they have seem to have good ability to go into power saving states. My mellanox cards don’t.

10gbase-t ethernet is harder to pick, a lot of those cards run incredibly hot particularly the ones that expect server style cooling. Heard bad things about all of them.

Also heard that Windows has a hard time reaching 10G anyway.

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4. toast0 ◴[18 Nov 24 05:48 UTC] No.42170029[source]▶
> Also heard that Windows has a hard time reaching 10G anyway.

It really shouldn't. Microsoft invented or popularized Receive Side Scaling [1], which helps get things lined up for high throughput; but applications probably need to do a bit of work too.

[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/n...

5. toast0 ◴[18 Nov 24 06:00 UTC] No.42170092[source]▶
That's a pretty weird contraption. If you want weird, I'd suggest one of these https://www.ebay.com/itm/166884585625

Silicom PEG210 Silicom PE210G2BPI40-T-SD-BC7 Intel x540 based bypass NIC. In case you want to have the two ports connect together when the computer is off or something. Setup time is a bit more, but you can also configure them to act like normal NICs.

Usually show up around $15-25 like other x540 dual rj45 cards, but sometimes a bit less, cause they're weird.