Lan party Setup

[karlos]

Hi All

I am setting up a regular Gaming Lan and wonder what is the best network switch setup. There will be maximum 20 players either playing or filesharing - often at the same time. I currently have 3 8 port switchs which i thought i could simply uplink together to connect everyone. This will mean 7x 10/100 ports taken with 1 port as the uplink. My bigest question is does the uplink port have a bandwidth maximum of 10/100 therefore slowing down the other 7 ports. Is the answer to having full bandwidth to go for say a 24 port switch so there is a constant stream?

Any links to the physical networking a lan party setup would be helpful also.

[pave_spectre]

Welcome to http://www.pcguide.com/ubb/pcgubb.gif forums!

I suspect getting a single 24 port switch might be a better solution, particularly if there will be a lot of traffic or large file transfers going on.

With multiple switches uplinked, if more than one person on each switch tries to communicate with others on a different switch, then they will all be trying to use the same single uplink connection, limiting the individual banwidth of each user.
If they are just regular 8 port switches then the uplink port will have the same bandwidth as a regular port of only 10/100M.

Even with a single switch if everyone tries to communicate with a single machine you will still end up with a bottleneck, but a single switch setup should reduce the number of bottlenecks.

[karlos]

Ok cool, thanks!

So for larger networks its simply a matter of having a gigabyte uplink port.

Will cope with potential bottlenecks for the moment though.

I will have an internet broadband gateway/file server operating and must cap the net usage to around 100mb per user. But I don't want to cap there lan usage. I presume i could just put a limiter of some sort on the internet gateway/file server? Can anyone recomend a suitable product?

I would prefer (for simplicity) to have the lan network on a DHCP server but is this to hard to control/monitor bandwidth?

[pave_spectre]

I can't think of anything offhand that would cap individual internet bandwidth usage straight out of the box, though there are a few SmoothWall (http://www.smoothwall.org) version 2.0 mods that could perhaps be adapted to this function based on IP address. This would of course require knowing the IP addresses, which could be controlled by the use of a smoothwall box as DHCP server.

There are probably other solutions out there this is just the one with which I am most familiar.

I would also highly recommend keeping the file server and internet gateway on seperate machines for security purposes.

[Bumstedmans]

I believe that in order to hook up multiple switches to each other, you must disable the built-in DHCP server on each switch, except for the one that is connected to the internet. (The option that gives all the Pcs on the network their own ip-address). This prevents Ips from clashing, and allows the network to function. in most routers/switches, this can be found in an online config, usually located at http://192.168.0.1

However, when setting up multiple swiches, you will loose a port or 3 in the process. you must run a Ethernet cable from port 1 on the Internet-connected switch to the second into port 1 as well. Do not plug it into the WAN port... will not work.

I hope I know what I am talking about:p

-The Bumstedman

[pave_spectre]

Originally posted by Bumstedmans
I believe that in order to hook up multiple switches to each other, you must disable the built-in DHCP server on each switch,

Standard switches (not these new-fangled hybrid modem/router/switches, just regular switches) don't have DHCP servers, and except for specific requirements its unlikely that someone would have two devices running DHCP by default.
Also, unless they are specified as being 'managed swiches', they wouldn't usually have a web-based configuration.

[Bumstedmans]

yeah, I was only speaking out of experience that I had with the 2 router/switches that I own. Really wasnt sure.


-The Bumstedman