Hey there, at our college where trying to organise a LAN for xmas time. im fairly clued up with networking in general but ive never created a large Lan. ok so were looking to create a lan with around 40 Pcs and a central file server (for the games, mods and patches). ide just like your thoughts really on how to do this, would the network need to be segmented at all? and will we need anything like a DHCP server?
You would most certainly need DHCP enabled to assign all your computers an IP address, with 40 pc's segmenting will not be necessary, but it might be an idea to get gigabit ethernet for the server and switch for all the bandwidth (this does not mean the clients will need gigabit). You would want to turn off the firewall for ease of use and you'll definatly be needing windows server 2000 or 2003 to handle 40 connections. It's pretty simple to set up if you set the server to have a static ip address and give this address out to your clients along with the shared file with the game data on it. Be sure it's read only.
ok cool, thanks for the fast responce. i have windows 2000 advance server so i can use that. il have a play around with visio to produce some network designs. So your sugesting a gigabit line between the server and switch? we should be able to do that, ive got gigabit lan on my comp so may use that as the server.
I was more of suggesting gigabit switches as well as a gigabit server if possible as everyone will be communicating with each other. But 100mbps would be the minimum bandwidth you need. The less switches you have the less lactency you have. Otherwise your plan would work well.
if you can get 2x 24 port (or more)gigabit switches then that'd be awesome but if they're only 100mbit with gigabit uplinks then it'll probably still work, just try not to have everything hammering the file server at the same time
ok well im not sure what the college has switch wise (im certainly not shelling out for 2 24port gigabit switches ) il find that out monday as for the server, i think it prob will only get hammered at the start of the lan with everyone accessing it to get the games ETC
You could always set up two servers, or limit connections to the server. Another option would be to create a couple of dvds with patches and mods etc to go around, this way you can get everybody sorted quickly.
Make sure the server is running a decent processor and plenty of memory. You might not need a DHCP server if you guys are going to be using the existing school's network. When we do LAN parties at my school we don't have to do anything besides takes a few of the computer labs and plug our computers in to the existing CAT5 plugs and if were playing Halo we just steal enough class rooms for 4 people to play on each xbox and hook the xbox's up to the classroom's projector and plug it into the CAT5 plug.
well we wont be using their network as such or their computers, its a BYOC event. we will be using thier switches and cables etc. As for the server if we use my comp i have a AMD 3000+ 64bit processor with a gig of corsair ddr 400 ram + gigabit lan so that will be fine.
Theres a good guide on Toms Networking to setting up a LAN. Edit: here, here , and here . Mostly irrelevant, but some of it might be useful.
