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

Yeah, it's impressive that someone built this. But the most impressive thing to me is that he has a group of friends who have been doing LAN parties together for 30 years. I can't think of anyone that I know that still does that.

My junior high friends that I've been having parties with for 30 years live in Minneapolis (where I grew up). They fly out for New Year's Eve each year.

But, in fact, some friends who regularly attended LAN parties in the Bay Area moved to Austin around the same time we did. And some others are also willing to travel for New Year's.

(Most parties are just local people, of course.)

Plenty of people in tech moved from Silicon Valley to Austin to get a better tax / quality of life deal, even in my social circle. Remote working becoming widely available really made a difference.

I'm in a completely different part of the world, but for similar reasons I ended up with a few friends in tech who moved to the same part of the world - and I've also met similar profiles to ours, attracted by the same reasons.

Oof. Back in the day friends and I would get together to LAN and the first few hours would just be fiddling with network cards, cables, terminators and software.

There was always someone who would just be totally unable to connect with someone else.

I've definitely been to a LAN party where IP addresses were written on clothes pegs by the entrance. You take a peg on your way in, clip it to your ethernet cable, configure that IP statically!

Windows will self-assign from 169.254/16 in the absence of a DHCP server.

I remember the parts of the 90s where the most reliable LAN party connections for the games we were playing were IPX/SPX or worse, as I recall, and they didn't really have automatic addresses at all, so trial and error configuration tweaking in DOS config files, DOS Game UIs, the Windows 3.11 UIs, and then Windows 95 UIs was way too much of the process.

It is amazing to think how much IPv4 and IPv6 "just work" in comparison.

I remember the first time, we bought some 10BASE2 ethernet cards and BNC connector cables, and spend hours to figure out why it does not work, only then to learn the next day that we also need cable end terminators (if I remember that correctly). But then it worked and we had lots of fun.

What changes after years of playing? I assume everyone has every inch of the maps memorized?

Open-backed headphones are great for this. Best of both worlds.

Correct! We never wear headsets at LAN parties because it defeats the purpose.

Each computer has a sound bar and everyone just uses that. Yeah, that means everyone's sound gets mixed up and you don't get positional audio, but in practice it's fine and we'd rather be able to yell at each other.

Honestly it's just that how I've always done this, other ways seemed too noisy for me and breaking the flow of the game :)

That might or might not be due to the games we've mostly been playing on our LAN parties are coming from a bit different profile than "chill co-op" — more MOBAs or tactical / arena shooters. In those styles of games visual cues don't really help and not having the clear audio puts you at a disadvantage

The music is still playing in the background, though — the headsets are not 100% soundproof and you may still easily communicate via VoIP

Yeah, the "live talking" aspect without headsets isn't there, but I've found it doesn't bother me in the slightest. You still are in the same room, you get the "shoulder sense" of your team there, you still celebrate and have fun as one and lose as one singular organism, and that's the feeling I've kinda been chasing on my LAN parties and in my LAN centre

There are a few, actually :)

CCBoot is a Windows Server-based diskless solution I mentioned, and they also provide CCDisk, which can do "hybrid" mode — where there is a small SSD in every PC with base OS pre-installed and pre-configured, which then mounts an iSCSI game drive

GGRock is a fantastic product, in my opinion. It is pricy, but where as CCBoot relies heavily on knowing it's inner workings, GGRock is pretty much turnkey solution

There is also CCu Cloud Update, which I have heard of, but didn't try myself, since they sell licenses only in Asia, from what I remember

LANGAME Premium is an addon for LAN centre ERP system, which is basically an ITAAS solution based on TrueNAS. Of all paid offerings that one is my favourite so far — but you have to use their ERP and actually run a business for it to be cost-effective

NetX provides an all-in-one (router, traffic filter and iSCSI target) NUC-like server with pre-configured software on a subscription basis. I am most skeptical of that just on the basis that, from my research, two NVMe drives can't really handle the load from a fully occupied 40+ machines LAN centre. Not for a long time, at least

...and homebrew, of course. I myself am running a homebrew ZFS-based system which I'm extremely happy with

In your case, I'd go with building my own thing too. Does not take a lot of time if you know the inner workings and you have no additional OPEX for your room :)

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.

Smartlaunch

I've done a multi-seat gaming VM back in the day too. I don't think I'd want to do it again. Assigning hotplug USB devices was a pain: I mostly wanted unique USB devices per computer to easily figure which device was which. Though nowadays I would probably use a thin client Raspberry Pi running Moonlight to do it cheaply.

I think another issue is the limited amount of PCI-E lanes now that HEDT is dead. I picked up a 5930k for my build at the time for its 40 PCI-E lanes. But now consumer CPUs basically max out at 20-24 lanes.

Also with the best CPUs for gaming nowadays being AMD's X3D series because of its additional L3 cache, I wonder about the performance hit with 2 different VMs fighting for cache. Maybe the rumored 9950X3D will have 2 3D caches and you'd be able to pin the VMs to each CPU cores/cache. The 7950X3D had 3D cache only on half of its cores, so games generally performed better pinned to only those cores.

So with only 2-3 VMs/PC, and you still needing a GPU for each VM which are the most expensive part anyway, I'd pay a bit more to do it without VMs. The only way I'd be interested in multiseat VM gaming again would be if I could utilize GPU virtualization: split up a single GPU into many VMs. But like you say in the article that's usually been limited to enterprise hardware. And even then it'd be interesting only for the flexibility, being able to run 1 high-end GPU for when I'm not having a party.

Just buy used 10G hardware from an HFT firm :). Seriously, though, 10G gear is cheap these days.

I bet one could put an unreasonable amount of effort into convincing an Nvidia Bluefield card to pretend to be a disk well enough to get Windows to mount it. I imagine that AWS is doing something along those lines too, but with more cheap chips and less Nvidia markup…

There has got to be a way to convince Windows to do an overlay block device that involves magic words like “thin provisioning”. But two seconds of searching didn’t find it. Every self-respecting OS (Linux, FreeBSD, etc) has had this capability for decades, of course. Amusingly, AFAICT, major clouds also mostly lack this capability — performance of the obvious solution in AWS (boot everything off an AMI) is notoriously poorly performing.

It's been a couple years, but when I built our in-office render farm for my previous company I also got motherboards with built-in 10G because they needed 4GPU's and there simply no more PCIe slots left. There were so many connectivity issues, but eventually it was solved when we replaced the switches. When I first built the farm there was only one brand that sold cheap 10gbit ethernet switches, but a couple years later finally ubiquiti started making them as well and I think now all of the semi-pro brands sell 10gbit switches. Since we swapped to ubiquiti switches we had no more connectivity issues, not even with the cheap 10G interfaces.

The good intel 10G cards were not expensive at all by the way, I bought them for later additions, and they were cheaper than the premium we paid for the money-gamer motherboards that included 10G cards that I saw you were unhappy about too.

> Yeah I could get higher-quality 10G cards and put them in all the machines but they seem expensive...

Bulk buying is probably hard, but ex-enterprise Intel 10G on eBay tends to be pretty inexpensive. Dual spf+ x520 cards are regularly available for $10. Dual 10g-base-t x540 cards run a bit more, with more variance, $15-$25. No 2.5/5Gb support, but my 10g network equipment can't do those speeds either, so no big deal. These are almost all x8 cards, so you need a slot that can accomidate them, but x4 electrical should be fine (I've seen reports that some enterprise gear has trouble working properly in x1/x4 slots beyond bandwidth restrictions which shouldn't be a problem; if a dual port card needs x8 and you only have x4 and only use a single port, that should be fine)

I think all of mine can pxeboot, but sometimes you have to fiddle with the eeprom tools, and they might be legacy only, no uefi pxe, but that's fine for me.

And you usually have to be ok with running them with no brackets, cause they usually come with low profile brackets only.

I am not a gamer, but I found that https://moonlight-stream.org/ latency when streaming from my server to mbp is lower than that of my projector directly connected to said server. Might be easier to just get a beefy server with gpu passthrough than fight 10gbe drivers on 10 machines. Amd cards seem to work amazing for passthrough.

I'm building out a 10G LAN in my house (8k VR video files are ludicrously enormous) and while it's mostly Mac, where I use Thunderbolt to SFP fiber adapters, for my Windows PC I'm looking around at what PCI options to get, and haven't pulled the trigger.

If you make a decision on a 10G card (SFP or ethernet) I'd like to hear what you picked.

You can get used ones super cheap on ebay. The same applies to RAM, CPUs and other parts.

No need to buy new for most computing equipment unless you're looking for the absolute latest and greatest.

Yeah, gaming in a VM is fairly easy and reliable nowadays (the keyword to google for is VFIO). The cost savings is pretty substantial from consolidating multiple machines into one bigger machine. Unfortunately, there's an increasing number of games with anticheat that looks for being inside a VM.

> onboard 10G Marvell AQtion ethernet

I had similar problems with an Aquantia 10GbE NIC (which AQtion appears to be the rebranded name for, post-acquisition by Marvell), and it turned out to be the network chip overheating because it was poorly thermally bonded to a VRM heatsink that defaulted to turning on at something like 90C. Adding a thicker thermal pad and setting the VRM fan to always be on at 30% solved my problems.

> Hah, you really did the VM thing? A lot of people have suggested that to me but I didn't think it'd actually work. Pretty cool!

Another data point that it is indeed possible. I had a dual Xeon E5-2690 v2 setup with two RX 580 8GB cards passed through to separate VMs, and with memory and CPU pinning it was a surprisingly resilient setup. 150+ FPS in CSGO with decent 1% lows (like 120 if I remember correctly?) which was fine since I only had 60Hz monitors. I have a Threadripper workstation now, I should test out to see what kind of performance I can get out of that for VM gaming...

> Yeah I could get higher-quality 10G cards and put them in all the machines but they seem expensive...

I have had very good luck with Intel X540 cards. $20-40 on eBay, and there’s hundreds (if not thousands) available. They’re plug-and-play on any modern Linux, but need an Intel driver on windows if I remember correctly. I’ve never had one die and I’ve never experienced a crash or network dropout in the 9 years I’ve been running them. The Marvell chipset just seems terrible, unfortunately - I’ve had problems with it on multiple different cards and motherboards on every OS under the sun.

Sadly no. Probably due to embarrassment. I had gone through this effort but didn't manage to ever get more than 4 or 5 people over simultaneously to take advantage of it. Maybe if I had taken pictures and actually shared it around a bit more, I could have gotten more out of the setup!

I guess it depends on what sort of games you're playing, but isn't it possible for the lack of n-key rollover to be a problem? My understanding is that many of these keyboards fail to register inputs if too many keys are pressed at the same time.

Don't you run into issues with n-key rollover with those old membrane keyboards?

I wouldn’t get a mechanical keyboard for durability but for the feeling of the keys when pressing them.

Not all mechanical keyboards are noisy.

I use TTC Silent Bluish White switches which produce a muted "thock" sound, rather than the loud "clickety-clack" that you're probably thinking of. They're only slightly louder than a typical membrane keyboard.

The noise of a room full of soundbars ;)

Yep. The fact that in most places in the US it's illegal to build apartments above shops is insane. That's the norm in the UK.

> fundamentally the result of every major city making it expensive or impossible to actually build enough housing

ZIRP certainly had something to do with this too! Don’t overlook ridiculous fiscal and monetary policy.

> Changing taxes (in either direction) really wouldn't move the needle at all.

Henry George begs to differ. He would say that you start with The One Tax and the resulting pressure on zoning will be unbearable. Good reading: "Land is a Big Deal" by Lars Doucet.

> Changing taxes (in either direction) really wouldn't move the needle at all.

Mmm... if you introduced higher taxes for anyone who owns multiple houses and has rental income for one or more of those homes and you eliminated from the current tax code their ability to claim deductions, it would definitely move the needle on housing prices and availability.

[flagged]

No.

The global housing crisis is the result of international organised crime owning or operating most of the large construction conglomerates, using real estate as a fiat currency to wash the proceeds from all their illicit business, and (org crime infested) private equity companies cashing in on the former situation, pumping assets by buying up available real estate just to make it unavailable.

CRIME is the real reason worldwide for people not being able to afford a house.

As someone that was previously bullish on Workers but now fully disillusioned with a barely positive cost basis on it right now I disagree with this - if anything I feel burned for believing and continuing to believe.

Either way, people like me aren’t going to be able to capture even a tenth of the success of joining Google in 2005 or buying a $1m house in Palo Alto ~4 years after graduating (I’m 6.5 years out of graduating) because people like me aren’t as human as the folks that own this house.

I want both too, but neither is going to happen in the next 4-12 years so I can only fantasize about punitive measures

I spend about $3.2k a month for a studio apartment in an HCOL area. I don’t even own a car.

Increases to income tax generally won't lower a wealthy persons wealth, just the rate at which they can increase their wealth. They already have the money, and it will keep paying dividends and interest.

Unless you're talking about a new kind of wealth tax, but those aren't particularly popular...

It doesn’t. They’re just expressing their jealousy in a thinly veiled and highly embarrassing way.

How would that even be possible? Presumably some people get a top up if they are on a tiny wage, but ‘direct contribution to take home pay’ really isn’t the point of tax. It also sounds a fairly inefficient use of money.

Have I missed something in this conversation?

When health insurance is 10x cheaper because of it.

It’s someone who owns shares in Cloudflare (their market ticker being ‘NET’), but everyone here thinks they’re a financial wonk when talking about big tech and finance so they insist on making it opaque like that. It’s a dumb and cringey trend. Just say “as a Cloudflare shareholder”, I promise you the six bytes you save won’t be missed!

A somewhat small subset of my net worth is Cloudflare, which has the ticker symbol $NET

I suppose if you want to raise a family AND have a huge dedicated lan party area, then maybe 130 sqm isn't enough.

But I do agree with you. We live in a 4 bedroom detached house approx 120 sqm and this is plenty of space for a family. In fact, it's above average space out of all the families I know...

In fact, calling 1400 sq ft a bachelor pad and then complaining about housing is unaffordable there is hilarious on many levels.

I live in what would be considered a large house in the UK and it’s marginally larger than that!

3/4 of Americans are overweight or obese now. We need a lot of room.

At first, my jaw was open looking at the photos.

Then I remembered… oh yeah, everything is bigger in America (especially in Texas)!

Not for a reasonable price, anyway. There are some homes that have added basements to get the space, but now we're talking something like $6 million, if not more.

Sorry, by "my office" I meant the building my employer owns.

There were several companies when I searched for "shutters OR blinds inside double glazing".

Might be able to use a flipper zero as the sensor, if the cats are chipped. Then you'll have data to catch any unusual usage, like a urinary blockage, before it becomes a serious problem! At that point you're a smart switch and Home Assistant script away from fan control.

Constant fans are sucking outside air into your house. Could be part of your Heat/AC efficiency problem mentioned in your post. A timer to run every 10th minute would be a simple improvement.

A sensor would be easy enough, there are simple non-smart sensor fan timer that will activate a fan for a programable time.

Having lived in the Midwest, Texas and Bay Area I can soundly say there is no comparison which can be made about the natural splendor. Bay Area, even with smoke in the air for a week, is orders of magnitude more comfortable and interesting. In Texas people cloister into giant houses and say goodbye to enjoying nature, it’s really sad that people prefer such a reality. It lets them forget just how grand a world there is worth saving and fighting for instead of letting it all become privatized and exploited unsustainably.

Are people in Austin more concerned about fluoride?

I suspect it will be interesting when people all realize too much fluoride is very bad and isn’t actually disinformation. It’s obviously not an intentional conspiracy to make people dumb but it happens to be outdated science to fluoridate city water at levels we do in the US.

The kids' cat doors have latches so they can lock them.

The primary bedroom's cat door technically is lockable but I don't know why I'd ever lock it!

The lower-level bedroom's cat door doesn't have a lock, but you could easily put something heavy in front of the door to block it.

Wow. Sustained for the full hour? That's 7200kWh monthly. Roughly 2x per sqft compared to my 80's home.

I've spent a lot of time in my attic air sealing, distributing insulation that was poorly installed, installing new insulation, insulating the basement, air sealing the basement. In my experience, it did not lower my power usage but in that time I added a second heat pump so I can't compare apples to apples. I can anecdotally say the upstairs seems to retain its temperature better. I'm hoping this winter I'll know if it helped.

If you end up solving your problem blog about it and I'll read it...

Thanks, somehow I missed that entry.

Indeed that’s what OP did. Bought in the Bay low, then sold high and moved to Austin, where presumably the increase in value is again sufficiently high because Austin prices skyrocketed in the last 5 years.

Ah, I think I see where I failed to explain what I meant.

You could skip the orchestration and remote storage layers altogether and cut your commands you run down to ~0 with local nvme SSDs. What orchestration do PCs running Steam and Epic need? Machines can just auto-update, unless you really like reinventing that or only have a few megabits of bandwidth.

Again, it's not that the netboot setup isn't cool to see built, I was just thinking out loud how to simplify it even further.

I meant your thing works great so good for you !

But to me it sounds harder to maintain than just wake on lan + pxe to reimage the machines before every lan party.

I think it's specifically the fact that they access their disk remotely live that's bothering me.

Why not just image it to the ssd and call it a day ?

I probably don't have the chops to work at cloudflare, but if I did, the lan party invites would be a huge selling point.

Have a look into Passivhaus principles.

In your case I'm surprised that a new build did not have all the heating/cooling aspects calculated. How would you even dimension your HVAC if you don't know the numbers?

There are easy and not so easy solutions:

1. heat recovery ventilation - equalizes the incoming and outgoing ventilation air temperature so you don't have to heat or cool the inside as much but still get a lot of fresh and filtered air.

2. solar shades positioned in a way that shades the sun when it's high i.e. summer time but lets sun in when it's low during the winter.

3. proper insulation and air-tightness .. a hard sell for a house that just came online.

4. ground loop heat-pumps instead of air source.

Other than that I like your house, especially fond of the integrated catwalks/doors!

It's almost certainly insolation (sol, not sul). UV/IR rejecting film on the windows might help, given mild enough winters that blocking it year round is fine. Check out https://youtu.be/uhbDfi7Ee7k

If you can find someone willing to do it, dumping the heat (pumped out as air conditioning) directly into the pool would be quite efficient relative to heating the pool separately. Have it dump to the ambient outdoor air only as overflow when the pool's thermostat is satisfied (upper 80s or whatever).

Awesome!

Let me guess: the LCD monitor sitting at the comfy empty chair was yours. Meanwhile, your friends lugged their bulky CRT monitors to your house—nearly breaking the monitors in the process—and instead of being jealous, they insisted it was worth it for the superior color accuracy, contrast ratios, and refresh rates.

Also, shoutout to moms with camcorders and minivans—two things we were all embarrassed by back then but now fully appreciate for their superior practicality.

Have you thought about using Clonezilla and broadcasting out an image using PXE boot?

Would completely bypass the iSCSI setup, and each machine would still get the latest image from your server before the lan party begins.

Ah yah, I think this exactly gets at what I mean.

> I'm a little less nostalgic for the experience of trying to copy game files over the network to get everyone on the same version, or pitying the one friend who inevitably has to reinstall Windows and doesn't manage to get in-game until after midnight.

What you are describing is a cultural coming together in a digital kind of way. People would gather and bring their own computers and you would all work together to try and get those computers to talk to each other. Often someone would get their computer fixed up or made worse, but in any case the home setup of each person was changed a little bit by each LAN party. To me, that's the essential element of a LAN - the communal mixing and sync'ing of setups and programs that flows back out into each individuals' home. You can imagine it as a kind of digital breathing or hugging where folks gather together, commune, and then leave somewhat changed. We would try to have spare boxes for people who didn't have equipment or time to bring theirs, but it wasn't the same. This is exceedingly well constructed and imagined, and to me you've essentially built a private net cafe - complete with the netboot arrangement. It's really impressive but I don't think you should call it a LAN.

You're missing out, definitely give it a go! GeforceNow is a staggering leap over all the other previous cloud streaming services imo. The experience in Austin specifically is amazing, I get ~5ms (!) RTT latency to their datacenter in Dallas. Combine that with h/w AV1 decoding, the difference versus local is almost unperceivable.

May I recommend the 3M Precise Mouse Pad with Repositionable Adhesive Backing? Dumb name, good product.

https://www.amazon.com/3M-Precise-Repositionable-Adhesive-MP...

> the wood where my mouse was kept attracting weird black spots

Have the same issue, but can't subscribe to mousepads. I believe that's dust getting in the crevices of the wood.

What do you use for the other controls? Start, select, exit, confirm... I have an older L-Tek and I really wish I had one with all nine step buttons (for other dance games) plus control button on top. Also kudos for not using a cheater bar :D. I don't see the old-school no-bar playing much anymore but I find it much more impressive.

Is Stepmania still the go-to DDR clone? This is very nostalgic. :)

Thanks, those were the main recommendation the last time I looked into it (a few years ago), good to hear you recommend them too!

The worst Linus... the one who pretends to understand computers on youtube for a living.

For me it is the MS intellimouse

The new one is a lot more expensive but I might get it.

Should we really be upset about that in particular?

It's not at all obvious to me that the more wealth they have on the top end the worse off we are at the bottom end.

I too would have a great attitude if I had that much money lol

I don’t drink, chud. Also please tell me in which year you were able to purchase a home by flipping burgers, chud.

I'm not an american, 200k/year is practically unheard of in the EU lol

Fake news.

> The house overall was a 7-digit number. Sorry, I'm not comfortable being any more specific than that.