Newbie questions about LAN party setup

[Andhrimnir]

I'm probably hosting a LAN party for myself and about eight friends in a month or so. I'm new to network setup and haven't hosted a LAN party before. I drew up this network map really quick in paint so I'd have something to explain with.

My questions are mainly these:

will the 54Mb/s limit on the router be a bottleneck to the faster switch? If so, will we still be able to play with this bottleneck? If not, is there a better way to set it up without dropping more money on equipment?

Second, is there anything people need installed on their computers besides the games to run this setup? I assume they have a network card and TCP/IP already set up - are other preparations necessary?

thanks in advance for any help,

-Andhrimnir

 

[sturm]

If your not going to play over the internet or don't need the internet, your best bet would be to run a dhcp server on the host machine and only use the switch.
The 54Mbs rating is only for wireless connections. All wired connections would run at 100Mbs.
If you need the router for internet access try to plug in all the computers to the switch and then to the router last.
As for installed stuff they will only need the games. For file sharing all the computers should be in the same workgroup. I would turn off all firewalls especially if there is no internet connection.

 

[Andhrimnir]

alright thanks. Reading the packaging again, it's pretty obvious about the 54Mb/s wireless speed - can't believe I missed it. We will need internet to play steam games unfortunately, but if it's 100Mb/s wired speed on the router, we should be fine. thanks again.

 

[wuzy]

RJ-45 ports (on your router) most certainly means at least 100Mbit/s Ethernet these days.
5 user is more than easy for the router's DHCP to handle so no problem there. With DHCP doing its magic on TCP/IP your diagram looks fine. Just don't expect stellar leeching performance between you buddies for rigs that are not hooked to the Gigabit switch.