I help with an event that has a pretty decent sized lan party as well.
We're not just focused on the lan party, more of a rock concerts - huge
arcade - panels - lan party type event.
It was a few years ago that a mincraft "griefing" team came and attacked
the network internally. At the time the BYOC LAN party I think was using
3com switches on the edge. Griefers were doing MAC flooding or something
that was causing the switches to fall over. And not just the switch they
were connected to it was bringing down many of them. They were doing it in
spurts and the people dealing with the network thought the issue was
misbehaving equipment for a bit (it seemed foreign at that time that
someone from the community would be doing it.)
Mind you the people running things (volunteers) are running on little
sleep, had no time to build out security appliances let alone watch a
bunch of logs. They're pretty smart but you know - you get a bunch of
smart people together they all bicker about how to do things their way.
In the end, one of the griefers friends went and told on them, and that's
how they were discovered. Badges yanked and banned for life.
Most of these cons and events run on surplus hardware. Granted, these days
there is more and more higher end stuff being cast away. More and more 10
gig, Juniper, Force10 and other decent equipment coming into play.
Getting bandwidth into the events is a pain. Huge venues are meant for
large corporate events not lower budget cons and festivals. Venue pricing
I believe is 750-1500$ per megabit. 100 megabit = $75,000 for the weekend.
One year I rememeber there being a switch with 8 vlans on it sitting
outside the back door with 8 clear modems spread out all blinking away.
Geeks get creative.
These days, a random family next door gets their business class FiOS paid
for the entire year (with a good TV package) in return for a weekend or
two a year of it being slammed. But that isn't keeping up with demand.
I think sponsorship is in our future as far as bandwidth goes.
Internally, the hotels charge for any ports. So if you need cross connects
between rooms, it's pretty expensive. And it's managed by them so running
tagged traffic is a no go an other things. So out comes miles of fiber and
rolls of gaffers tape every year. And miles of cat5. The lan party is
fairly concentrated, but other departments all have other network needs.
HD video streams outbound, voip telephones, ARTNet, etc.
It's crazy. But I guess it's a good way to keep skills sharp and learn new
things.
Also, Steam and others should make a caching server solution similar to
what exists in Apple OSX server.
- Ethan
