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

(lanparty.house)
1071 points kentonv | 2 comments | 16 Nov 24 15:52 UTC | HN request time: 0.698s | 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

1. mschuster91 ◴[17 Nov 24 10:36 UTC] No.42163301[source]▶
> The machines all boot off of a network drive based on this image. Each machine gets a copy-on-write overlay on top of the main image, so that guests can make changes to their machine which won't be seen by any other, and will be deleted at the end of the party.

How do you deal with Windows licensing/activation in that scenario? I didn't see anything in the Github repository, and I can't imagine that not being the worst PITA.

replies(1): >>42164253 #
2. kentonv ◴[17 Nov 24 14:10 UTC] No.42164253[source]▶
Just buy licenses once on each machine and Windows figures it out from then on. I guess it phones home when it sees a hardware change and the server says "yep that serial number is licensed".

At least, that's how it worked for me in Palo Alto. For some reason with the new setup Windows complains about activation after every reimage, until I click "troubleshoot activation", and then it phones home and figures it out? I need to debug this.