LAN Party Help setup

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Captain-Price_ZA

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Hello Everyone
I have a few questions on LAN partys that I will be throwing in coming time.Now last lan we had a D-Link 8 port 10/100 switch model DES-1008D now when 1 person was copying from our fileserver eg. Cod4.iso some people were experincing LAG on the games and some can't access the fileserver at all when 1 person was copying now to run the next LAN 18+ peolple coming what will be requerd to run smoothly while 3 or 4 was leeching it won't affect the rest we have 2 servers one for files and one for our game servers. And after that what will be requerd to host a 50+ size lan party no lag and leeching all together

Please I need help ASAP
 
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Your problem was likely the server and the pc were capable of using the full 100m on the server port. 100m is not real fast anymore. I would make sure you buy switches that have at least gig ports for your server. Switches with all gig ports do not cost a lot more that ones that only run 100m.

50+ is a bad choice I think. Most switches come in 24 ports or 48 ports or other combinations like that. I would start with a 24 port switch and then buy another when you get to your 50 number (ie 48). If you actually think you will need 50 you would have to buy a 24 port and a 48 port or 3 24 port switches total. If you plan to stay with 100m ports be sure you have gig ports between the switches and your servers.

something like a...
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bill001g

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Your problem was likely the server and the pc were capable of using the full 100m on the server port. 100m is not real fast anymore. I would make sure you buy switches that have at least gig ports for your server. Switches with all gig ports do not cost a lot more that ones that only run 100m.

50+ is a bad choice I think. Most switches come in 24 ports or 48 ports or other combinations like that. I would start with a 24 port switch and then buy another when you get to your 50 number (ie 48). If you actually think you will need 50 you would have to buy a 24 port and a 48 port or 3 24 port switches total. If you plan to stay with 100m ports be sure you have gig ports between the switches and your servers.

something like a tplink TL-SG1024 can be had for about $100. This is what is called a wirespeed switch all ports can run at 1g up and 1g down simultaneously.
 
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Captain-Price_ZA

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Thanks a lot for the quick reply so I would purchase a gig nic for my server so I could transfer faster so if I get a gig nic for my server would that be a fix I will be looking into a gigabit switch for our next lan I'm thinking a 16 port gigabit for first I use a router but that's only to give the DHCP for our network and if I need 50 people I would require 24 port gigabit switches am I right?
 
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A 100Mbps switch is clearly not up to scratch for a remotely significant LAN-party - particularly if the file/game server is on a 100Mbps port as well.

For 18 players with file + game server, you should get a 24-ports 1000Mbps switch and connect everything to it. Two ports for servers, one port for the internet router, that leaves you with 21 ports for guests. A simple (unmanaged) 24-ports GbE switch can be found for less than $200. A switch with 24x100Mbps + 2/4x1GbE would also do well enough here - the servers would be connected to 1GbE ports.

For 50+ people, you may be able to get away with using three of those cheap $200ish switches if no group of people attached to any of the switches needs more than 1Gbps of bandwidth to any of the resources located on the other two: connect the three switches together with a pair of cables, connect your game server(s) to the middle switch along with the internet router, your file server(s) to the other switches and your clients to the remaining ports. You can also find some 48-ports unmanaged switches for ~$600, which would spare you one set of jumper cables between switches.

If you think you may need more than 1Gbps of interconnect between switches to avoid choking due to file transfers with the file server(s), you will need to look into managed switches and setting up LAGs or whatever other stacking technology your switch of choice supports but those will be 2-3X more expensive. The wiring setup is basically the same as above except LAGs let you use more than one jumper between switches to increase bandwidth and fancier features like MSTP also let you easily setup a crude ring topology for more uniform traffic distribution. You may also need dual-GbE NICs in those file servers to use with teaming/LAG on switches for extra bandwidth there too... maybe even quad-port NICs if your file server(s) either have SSDs or enough RAM to cache the ISOs.

The solution depends a lot on how much money you can afford to throw at it.
 
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bill001g

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That is the key question you must determine. Do you really anticipate that you will need to pass 1g of traffic between the switches. My guess would be you likely will not. We have a 1g fiber between a remote building with over 4500 people in it, no servers,internet anything so they must use the 1g fiber to get all that. They only use about 800m but it is close enough we are in process of going to 10g but mostly for future not because they actually need it today. This of course is work related traffic no gaming but I doubt you can really use 1g.

Still if you do then it become very expensive. First whatever you do not connect more 1 cable between each switch. The cheap unmanaged switch most times will loop. The slightly more expensive switches will use spanning tree and block one of the cables...which is the same as not really having it since it is backup only. You can get switches that will let you bond ports together to appear as larger ones and there are switches that use special stacking cables to connect the backplanes and of course you can get switches with 10g.

I would start with the $100 switch I linked and see how things go. Worst you will toss the $100 switch in the trash but it is a fraction of what you will pay for switches that can connect at greater than 1g. Most are well over $1000.
 
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Captain-Price_ZA

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What we will be aiming for is no lag so 2 x 24 port gigabit switches would do unmanaged can anyone reccomend maby a $100 one or less if possible and if there is 18 people will these 2 be up for the job of gaming and file sharing at the same time?
 
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He plans to have a file server serving game ISOs so those would be running at somewhere close to full 1Gbps for the first hour or so while people are installing games and mod packs on their systems to prepare.

You do not need to pay over $1000 for a (semi-)managed 24x1GbE switch: the first low-cost managed GbE switch I spotted was $600 but upon looking around a little longer, I found the NETGEAR ProSafe GS724Tv3 for under $300 in a few places such as $230 on Amazon.com.
 
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bill001g

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So lets assume he does have a server that is going to send 1g the first hour. How is even bonding the switches together even at 2g going to fix that. You still will not exceed 1g of data. You now get into also having to have a server that can bond ports and then disk systems that can deliver data at these rates and on and on.

So he goes out and spends lots of money so that he can cut 30 min off initial load time. By that logic he might as well get 10g switches.

You have to look at the realistic requirements. The requirements drive a project not the equipment. There are huge differences between 802.1ad port bond throughput and a stack cable or 10g port. To select these you must know these requirements. There are technical limitation in the $300 switches that may or may not have a impact but you don't know if you don't actually know the traffic.
 
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If you mean as in supporting more than 1Gbps between switches for high-speed file sharing with several clients, no, it is an unmanaged switch so it lacks LAG, MSTP and all other mechanisms that enable efficient scaling. Managed switches can also do some QoS management to prioritize traffic to/from the LAN game server(s) so other network IO won't slow it down.

For the gaming side of things after all the copying/installing is done, yes, it would be good enough to handle game and internet traffic.
 
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Captain-Price_ZA

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What I mean is will the tplink be enough since its a lan there will be minimal internet all servers we will be playing will be lan hosted eg: cod4 and crysis wars and bf1942 when let's say 10 are playing crysis and 5 are leeching crysis from the server with a gigabit nic and connection will there be lag if the game is hosted on a diffrent server in the same network will that leeching affect the players and the other servers performance???
 
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Captain-Price_ZA

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Please tell me if I have two servers one for dedicated game server and other for file server and they have gigabit connections and when 10 are gaming on the dedicated server and 5 to 8 are leeching off the other server will this affect gameplay if the switches is gigabit ones and also the servers nic's are gigabit nic's
 
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bill001g

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The game itself will cause almost no load on the switches people play this over slow dsl connections. The downloads could but it depends on lots of stuff. It depends how much you worry about a design that guarantees bandwidth. What happens if only 5 people play and 20 people download. At what point do you decide is enough. If you go to 2 servers you solve the issue of the server overload. You only have to content with the capacity between the switches. You really only have 2 options to be sure it works. Use 10g ports between the switches or buy a large switch with 48 or more ports as one unit. It will then use the backplane of the switch. It now is a matter of if you want to spend that kind of money for something that is unlikely to happen.

I suspect you will have no issues with 2 24 port switches. If you are really worried about it load software on the file server to limit its utilization to say 500m. Since the game and file servers are now different it you would have to have 500m of game traffic between the switches.
 
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Captain-Price_ZA

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Oh that's great last question if I have a gigabit network and all clients have 100mbit nics then that means if the file server have a gigabit nic then 10 people can copy files at 12 MB/s then the network will give its full capacity so only if 10 people copy's at 12MB/s then that will give the full capacity of the network correct me if I'm wrong please. Because 1gigabit = 128 megabyte and 128 megabyte divided by 12 megabyte per second gives me 10 people copying at the same time am I right???
 
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bill001g

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mostly true there is some overhead. Most PC software only measure the actual data where network count the data and the overhead. Likely you will get a server bottleneck of one kind or another when you get very close to 1g. Maybe to be safe plan 9 instead of 10.
 
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Most computers sold in the past 6+ years have 1GbE built-in. Unmanaged switches usually run at the fastest available speed so if you want to limit ports to 100Mbps, you would have to use a managed switch... unless you use a 24x100M + Nx1G switch but I do not remember seeing unmanaged switches with higher-speed uplink ports.

If this was for a cafe, commercial, some form of league or anything else of the sort, getting a 48-ports managed switch to start building the network from might be a better idea though.
 
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