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

(lanparty.house)
1071 points kentonv | 1 comments | 16 Nov 24 15:52 UTC | HN request time: 0.208s | 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

Show context
asn007 ◴[16 Nov 24 22:53 UTC] No.42160174[source]▶
That's a sweet LAN setup you've got! The only few things that rub me the wrong way is the choice of peripherals and the lack of headsets. Must be pretty noisy in here!

The tabletops also seems a bit too thin and wiggly for my taste, but, honestly, for LAN parties with chill people you personally know — it's ok

As for the actual host setup with a singular disk image — great job! LAN gaming centres do something similar with their setups, with some differences (a lot of centres either use Windows-based diskless solutions that mount vhdx files as drives remotely over iSCSI, or use ZFS-based snapshotting, which is my personal favourite)

But all in all, seems like my dream house :)

I own a chain of LAN gaming centres, so the feedback is definitely skewered into the business perspective quite a bit

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kentonv ◴[16 Nov 24 23:08 UTC] No.42160325[source]▶
I'm curious, what are the popular products/solutions that LAN centers use for this?

I ended up putting together my own thing. I saw various products that seemed like they might be what I wanted but they always seemed... sketchy.

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1. Moru ◴[17 Nov 24 11:56 UTC] No.42163698[source]▶
We were running a small internet cafe with gaming computers around 2000 and I found some bootable solution that you installed on every computer. It saved all changes temporarily and flushed everything on reboot, starting from the clean install you prepared the day before. Sadly there was no way of central storage possible with that program. Would have loved to build this setup at that time but money is always short.