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

submitted by kenton+(OP) on 2024-11-16 15:52:39 | 1117 points 378 comments
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I wasn't quite sure if this qualified as "Show HN" given you can't really download it and try it out. However, dang said[0]:

> If it's hardware or something that's not so easy to try out over the internet, find a different way to show how it actually works—a video, for example, or a detailed post with photos.

Hopefully I did that?

Additionally, I've put code and a detailed guide for the netboot computer management setup on GitHub:

https://github.com/kentonv/lanparty

Anyway, if this shouldn't have been Show HN, I apologize!

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22336638


NOTE: showing posts with links only show all posts
5. 082349+hr[view] [source] 2024-11-16 19:42:02
>>kenton+(OP)
LAN party game room by night, Cybersyn II by day?

But where are the ceiling duct tape hammocks? http://octanecreative.com/ducttape/walltapings/images/german...

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6. 082349+jr[view] [source] [discussion] 2024-11-16 19:42:23
>>f1shy+8r
Nope, USD 150k (for stations & cabinetry): https://lanparty.house/#cost
29. Symbio+dz[view] [source] 2024-11-16 20:45:41
>>kenton+(OP)
> [High AC cost.] Perhaps we have too many windows letting in too much sunlight...

My office has automatic blinds that open and close according to some climate control system. The blinds are within the double glazing, so they can't be damaged by weather (or cats). The nice version for a home would be something like [1].

I'm sure the owner could program the automation so they only change position if no-one is in the room. There's no point having sunlight streaming into an empty room.

[1] https://www.betweenglassblinds.co.uk/

40. RulerO+JA[view] [source] 2024-11-16 20:56:45
>>kenton+(OP)
> I've never heard of anyone else having done anything like this. This surprises me! But, surely, if someone else did it, someone would have told me about it? If you know of another, please let me know!

I never had the tenacity to consider my build "finished," and definitely didn't have your budget, but I built a 5-player room[1] for DotA 2 back in 2013.

I got really lucky with hardware selection and ended up fighting with various bugs over the years... diagnosing a broken video card was an exercise in frustration because the virtualization layer made BSODs impossible to see.

I went with local disk-per-VM because latency matters more than throughput, and I'd been doing iSCSI boot for such a long time that I was intimately familiar with the downsides.

I love your setup (thanks for taking the time to share this BTW) and would love to know if you ever get the local CoW working.

My only tech-related comment is that I will also confirm that those 10G cards are indeed trash, and would humbly suggest an Intel-based eBay special. You could still load iPXE (I assume you're using it) from the onboard NIC, continue using it for WoL, but shift the netboot over to the add-in card via a script, and probably get better stability and performance.

[1]: https://imgur.com/a/4x4-four-desktops-one-system-kWyH4

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42. kenton+2B[view] [source] [discussion] 2024-11-16 20:59:46
>>hk1337+vA
See: https://lanparty.house/#why-build-in
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47. builds+pC[view] [source] [discussion] 2024-11-16 21:09:37
>>kenton+Nz
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...

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102. slumbe+XP[view] [source] [discussion] 2024-11-16 22:56:09
>>r1ch+iO
Not OP, but he website addresses this: https://lanparty.house/#cable-latency
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105. crooke+IQ[view] [source] [discussion] 2024-11-16 23:00:24
>>clucki+ZK
> using real estate as a fiat currency

Even if we take your premise as a given, the entire reason real estate is so valuable is that there isn't enough housing in the first place. Real estate is, by its nature, a bad investment; it's only the scarcity of it that makes the value continue to go up exponentially.

> buying up available real estate just to make it unavailable

There isn't actually any available housing in the first place, at the point of cities even approving projects, compared to the number of people who need housing. That's the problem. The most extreme example is San Francisco, where as of this July the entire city had approved only 16 housing units [1] out of an already comically poor goal of only about 10,000 housing units per year.

[1] https://www.newsweek.com/san-francisco-only-agreed-build-16-...

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156. kenton+L71[view] [source] [discussion] 2024-11-17 01:48:41
>>aeturn+Y41
I thought that too originally! This is covered in the Q&A:

https://lanparty.house/#why-build-in

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160. throwa+381[view] [source] [discussion] 2024-11-17 01:53:21
>>wdr1+FH
Linus Sebastian from LTT has a series of videos about his in home gaming centre with computers in his house mechanical room.. This is one of them ... But worth a look http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=aKRyZelOp7Y
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169. murder+5a1[view] [source] [discussion] 2024-11-17 02:17:19
>>kridsd+IH
You can get pretty cheap 10GBASE-T NICs on ebay. I've had pretty good success with this abomination, a server-pull NIC with an HP proprietary physical interface plugged into an adapter to PCI-E: https://www.ebay.com/itm/144151881516
216. 0xDEAF+Js1[view] [source] 2024-11-17 07:38:26
>>kenton+(OP)
Sweet setup!

I used to play games over LAN with my brothers when we were teenagers. We played every year or two, and every time we'd spend hours fiddling with the networking in order to get things to work. This was annoying. It left me dreaming about a LAN cafe where the proprietor has lots of games pre-installed, and you can just sit down and play with your friends, or make some new friends and play with them.

This could be especially good for cult classic games from previous decades that are even more difficult to get working with modern OS+hardware. I'm thinking of the game Moonbase Commander in particular. https://store.steampowered.com/app/254880/MoonBase_Commander...

218. Animat+Pt1[view] [source] 2024-11-17 07:51:40
>>kenton+(OP)
A PC bang in your house?[1] Why not?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC_bang

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220. hunter+vu1[view] [source] [discussion] 2024-11-17 08:03:07
>>kenton+Jh1
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).

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223. pentag+gw1[view] [source] [discussion] 2024-11-17 08:29:47
>>Ringz+6s1
I think it may be http://tastyspleen.net/
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229. tarasg+0A1[view] [source] [discussion] 2024-11-17 09:28:52
>>kenton+dD
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.
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248. Symbio+PG1[view] [source] [discussion] 2024-11-17 11:15:13
>>tossan+XC1
Yes.

The idea was specified in 2005, and there's a related question about Windows using these addresses in 2011 [1]. I haven't tried to find older evidence.

[1] https://superuser.com/questions/238625/why-is-windows-defaul...

269. v3ss0n+xR1[view] [source] 2024-11-17 13:39:25
>>kenton+(OP)
If you are doing lan-parties , this opensource AAA Game is the best . https://totemarts.games/games/renegade-x/ It is Command and Conquer Renegade , RTS + FPS Game with frontend backend opensourced rebuild from scratch in Unreal 3 . Needs a lot of teamwork and strategy to win and all gameplay is according to CNC Rules.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_VHennwBhG8

Source code

https://github.com/TotemArts/Renegade-X https://totemarts.games/forums/files/file/7-renegade-x-softw...

Game Client

https://totemarts.games/games/renegade-x/downloads.html

They have a New game working in Unreal 4 Which have full build building and production RTS mechanic.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhzZ3GMerz4

They would use some help from you guys to spread around, they are fully self funded and voulenteers working full time , to build a game that is fun for hardcore playerbase.

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273. alchem+aT1[view] [source] [discussion] 2024-11-17 14:08:43
>>blackq+sq1
What is significant political progress is that such measures are now allowed to be debated if they are justified or not. Western political culture clearly shifted far towards dogmatism and needed a course correction. We shouldn’t be afraid to question scientists and studies.

It is factually correct fluoride can be dangerous and studies have shown that. It is also factually correct fluoride in water reduces cavities. The debate is the risk rewards lines and safety.

https://www.newsweek.com/epa-fluoride-drinking-water-risks-c...

> Federal officials have recommended a fluoridation level of 0.7 milligrams per liter of water as of 2015. This is a decrease from the recommended upper ranger of 1.2 milligrams from the 50 years before that. Meanwhile, the EP has a longstanding requirement that water systems cannot have over 4 milligrams of fluoride per liter of water. For comparison, the international safe limit for fluoride in drinking water as stated by the World Health Organization (WHO) is 1.5 milligrams

The A/B testing you reference in Canada is interesting data obviously. It’s also possible reducing cavities with fluoride comes at an IQ cost isn’t it?

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281. amicha+YZ1[view] [source] [discussion] 2024-11-17 15:28:16
>>Symbio+PG1
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc3927

"Microsoft Windows 98 (and later) and Mac OS 8.5 (and later) already support this capability."

And https://www.techrepublic.com/forums/discussions/win-98-fails...

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287. kenton+r32[view] [source] [discussion] 2024-11-17 16:05:22
>>patric+S22
I dug up an old video from 2003 and tweeted it: https://x.com/KentonVarda/status/1857991074708369788

But my parties go back to 1996, before we had digital cameras. I'm hoping my mother is able to dig up some really old photos from her storage and scan them...

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308. dividu+kF2[view] [source] [discussion] 2024-11-17 21:03:47
>>mattbe+Cy1
Aka Peg-DHCP (RFC 2322) - https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2322.txt
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325. toast0+wo3[view] [source] [discussion] 2024-11-18 05:48:05
>>timc3+1n1
> Also heard that Windows has a hard time reaching 10G anyway.

It really shouldn't. Microsoft invented or popularized Receive Side Scaling [1], which helps get things lined up for high throughput; but applications probably need to do a bit of work too.

[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/n...

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326. toast0+xp3[view] [source] [discussion] 2024-11-18 06:00:23
>>murder+5a1
That's a pretty weird contraption. If you want weird, I'd suggest one of these https://www.ebay.com/itm/166884585625

Silicom PEG210 Silicom PE210G2BPI40-T-SD-BC7 Intel x540 based bypass NIC. In case you want to have the two ports connect together when the computer is off or something. Setup time is a bit more, but you can also configure them to act like normal NICs.

Usually show up around $15-25 like other x540 dual rj45 cards, but sometimes a bit less, cause they're weird.

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340. stemlo+IU4[view] [source] [discussion] 2024-11-18 19:19:09
>>alchem+7p2
I thought "earned income" was an actual accounting term (to define a type of taxable income as opposed to passive income):

https://itap1.for.irs.gov/owda/0/resource/Commentary_Files_R...

" Earned income is money received as payment for work, including wages, salaries, bonuses, commissions, tips, and net earnings from self-employment. For tax purposes, it can also include long-term disability payments, union strike benefits, and, in some cases, payments from certain deferred retirement compensation arrangements.

Income such as investment profits and Social Security payments is considered unearned income, also known as passive income."

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/e/earnedincome.asp

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376. nvarsj+HFf[view] [source] [discussion] 2024-11-22 20:42:52
>>jgeral+7A
L-Tek is probably the best option by far that is somewhat affordable.

Definitely penny-mod them too (just remove the panels, tape washers under the edge of each metal contact point - it makes the pads way more responsive and more fun to use).

You can also buy a portable barre bar on amazon, that's what I use. Super stable and easy to stow away. A bar lets you maintain form on crossovers/jumps, and I recommend for anyone not super casual (playing 12+).

Lastly, if you are really serious, you can buy a replica DDR pad from China for about 4-5k, or a used real pad for similar. The arcade feel is much better than L-Tek, but you need a lot of space for these. [1]

1: https://www.globalsources.com/Dance-pad/DDR-metal-dance-pads...

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