Show HN: I built a(nother) house optimized for LAN parties | Hacker News Reader

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

lanparty.house

1,117 pointskentonv381 comments

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

Open articleView on HN

I think the thing that I’m most amazed by - and this setup is truly amazing - is the fact that you’ve got a group of friends to enjoy this with. Good for you; this looks like a blast, and I can only imagine how fun that’d be, compared to years of purely solo gaming.

So real. Most valuable component of this setup

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.

I do, but the group is nowhere near large enough (3-4 people) that we need a house dedicated to it…

Especially amazing considering that he moved from Palo Alto to Austin. Did all his friends move too?

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.)

Hey Minneapolis for the win! Blaine area here :D

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.

Where did you move to if you don't mind me asking? The chasm between SV tech comp and various "completely different part of the world" is massive. Were you able to meet your employer in the middle?

I think it's a pretty sad state of affairs if the most amazing thing about this is having friends.

As the former proprietor of LanParty.com (which I mistakenly included in a sale to IGN) I must salute you. The absolute genius of the provided lan equipment and particularly the management thereof is an inspiration.

I think the lack of any standing offerings of variations of Quake is a glaring mistake but easily rectified. :)

It's really heartening to see lan gaming continued and offered in such a way that the amount of hassle and setup is minimized and the gaming is maximized. We spent far too much time in the 90's and 2000's dealing with driver issues, etc etc. Bravo.

I remember our biggest issue being IP addresses. We had no router, or expertise, so we were at the whims of automatic addresses (254.x... as far as I recall?). Good times.

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!

Aka Peg-DHCP (RFC 2322) - https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2322.txt

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

Also 15 years ago?

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.

Oddly enough, my memory of IPX/SPX was that it "just worked" by default whereas when we switched to IP we started having to manually configure IP addresses and make sure no one chose the same address.

That said my first LAN party was 1996 and we were running Windows 95 by that point, which probably helped.

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.

Yes, you need terminators for them :-)

Quake is still so much fun. Been playing for years with a group and it doesn't get old.

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

>What changes after years of playing?

New ways to exploit the physics to do things your opponents don't expect and can't easily reproduce. As the skill level of regular players increases, I always look for new ways to approach the maps.

That's a sweet LAN setup you've got! The only few things that rub me the wrong way is the choice of peripherals and the lack of headsets. Must be pretty noisy in here!

The tabletops also seems a bit too thin and wiggly for my taste, but, honestly, for LAN parties with chill people you personally know — it's ok

As for the actual host setup with a singular disk image — great job! LAN gaming centres do something similar with their setups, with some differences (a lot of centres either use Windows-based diskless solutions that mount vhdx files as drives remotely over iSCSI, or use ZFS-based snapshotting, which is my personal favourite)

But all in all, seems like my dream house :)

I own a chain of LAN gaming centres, so the feedback is definitely skewered into the business perspective quite a bit

Why would you use headsets to play with friends in person? The whole point is that you can talk directly, usually with the sound completely off on everyone’s computers, and not too loud music playing in the background

For one, if you get a bunch of nerds together a sizable fraction are likely to have sensory issues- and won’t come again if you don’t make it welcoming for them

Some video games require some sound as it shares information, but can usually be configured to only have those sounds, or to turn on an accessible visual indicator

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

I'm curious, what are the popular products/solutions that LAN centers use for this?

I ended up putting together my own thing. I saw various products that seemed like they might be what I wanted but they always seemed... sketchy.

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 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

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!

Yeah I'm pretty sure my onboard 10G Marvell AQtion ethernet is the source of most of my stability woes. About half the time any of these machines boot up, Windows bluescreens within the first couple minutes, and I think it has something to do with the iSCSI service crashing. Never had trouble in the old house where the machines had 1G network -- but load times were painful.

Luckily if the machines don't crash in the first couple minutes, then they settle down and work fine...

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

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.

If you’re on an Intel chip that supports “Resource Director,” you can assign most of your cache to a VM. I have no idea whether AMD can do this. I’ve also never done it, and I don’t know how well KVM supports it.

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.

+1 ebay x520 cards. My entire 10g sfp+ home network runs on a bunch of x520s, fs.com DACs/AOCs, Mikrotik switches, and an old desktop running FreeBSD with a few x520s in it as the core router. Very very cheap to assemble and has been absolutely bulletproof. IME at this point in time the ixgbe driver is extremely stable.

x520s with full-height brackets do exist (I have a box full of them), but you may pay like $3-5/ea more than the more common lo-pro bracket ones. If you're willing to pop the bracket off, you can also find full-height brackets standalone and install your own.

Also, in general: in my experience avoiding 10gbe rj45 is very worthwhile. More expensive, more power consumption, more heat generation. If you can stick a sfp+ card in something, do it. IMO 10gbe rj45 is only worthwhile when you've got a device that supports it but can't easily take a pcie nic, like some intel NUCs.

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 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

If its SFP then intel, they have seem to have good ability to go into power saving states. My mellanox cards don’t.

10gbase-t ethernet is harder to pick, a lot of those cards run incredibly hot particularly the ones that expect server style cooling. Heard bad things about all of them.

Also heard that Windows has a hard time reaching 10G anyway.

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.

Interesting! I sure hope that's not my problem because I uhhh really don't want to open up 20 machines to try to fix that.

I think it probably isn't the same problem, though, because I only have stability issues at initial startup. If it boots and doesn't BSOD in the first five minutes then it's fine... even through heavy network and disk use (like installing updates).

> 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.

What an incredible setup! Really wonderful house overall, to be honest.

Aside from all of the extremely epic technology and whatnot - I have got to say, the elevated view and outlook of your place is sensational. Congratulations on putting together such a terrific place to raise a family.

Oh and worth mentioning; I sincerely appreciated and enjoyed reading your comprehensive Q&A section beyond the images (which themselves, had really awesome annotations included). Thanks for sharing!

I did something like this at my last house but somewhat more covertly, with monitors going into storage but having VESA quick mounts hidden near the Ethernet hubs, a few on articulating arms that could pop out near couches etc.

My setup only supported 12, but was designed in a way where you could have 3 teams of 4 or 4 teams of 3 that got their own private area so they could more easily conspire against their opponents.

I think my most interesting design choice was that I had half the machines routed from the attic and half routed from the basement. Part of this had to do with retrofitting my setup into a house over 100 years old, but I thought it also worked very well. If I were to do it again, I'd probably mount all of the computers in the basement, since it would provide extra heat (for the house) in the winter and stay cooler (for the computers) in the summer when under load.

I have since moved, but haven't bothered to make it happen again. Life with kids is too busy, and I've largely abandoned the hobby because I believe it would not be a positive influence given the particular quirks of my children's personalities. Slowly easing back into the waters with board games, though.

This sounds interesting! Do you have any photos?

From the description this sounds like the most elaborate setup I've heard of aside from my own.

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!

This is neat, but as a $NET shareholder and someone with another ~$1m in net worth that can't afford to buy a house for at least another 6 years this makes me think we should significantly increase taxation.

Housing price issues in the US are fundamentally the result of every major city making it expensive or impossible to actually build enough housing. Changing taxes (in either direction) really wouldn't move the needle at all. What's needed are local zoning changes and significant revamps of permitting and approval processes to remove endless discretionary roadblocks from anyone who doesn't like medium density housing.

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.

It's in Germany too, but recently it's become the norm for new-rich people to buy or rent these apartments and then sue the shop and especially bar owners for noise violations.

Not allowing that kind of mixed usage in the first place completely cuts away all that crap.

> 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.

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.

> 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-...

This is absurd. Does it happen? Yes. But this is not the primary driver.

We turned housing into retirement funds. The median family's wealth is their primary residence. We cannot have these assets depreciate in nominal terms for this reason, and we actually need them to appreciate in real terms for people to have a nest egg.

It's awful, but it's the truth.

If you’re a Cloudflare shareholder, Kenton has increased your net worth quite a bit. He is one of the few people who is so unreasonably capable he can and has changed the direction of a multibillion dollar company single handedly. It sounds hyperbolic, but it’s not in this particular case.

I’m also fairly convinced he didn’t capture one tenth of one percent of the value he created, so I’m not sure how anyone can argue this is ‘unfair’.

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.

Take it easy. These kind of thought won't help you. It's a rough time out there but thing change. Our ancestors survived famines and war. We should be able to manage this.

And yes, life is not fair. But don't waste it, it's finite.

"people like me aren’t as human as the folks that own this house"

What do you mean? People aren't human if they do not have a certain level of wealth?

Seems to imply that you may think people with less wealth aren't valuable or even human. What should people with less wealth than you feel?

If you can't afford to buy a house, what you want is zoning reform, not increased taxation.

(I want both, but I don't want more taxes to solve the housing problem, because they won't.)

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

You have $1M of net worth that isn’t a house (and is therefore likely to be liquid) and you can’t afford to buy a house? Where and how much?

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

You need to move, yesterday. Yes, moving sucks. No, ideally you wouldn't have to. But at the end of the day you are just plain shooting yourself in the foot if you continue to live in a place that absurdly expensive.

Like dude, you could buy an awesome house in just about any other part of the country if you truly have $1m in liquid wealth. You have options to own a house, you just have to act on them.

It sounds more like you can afford to buy a house, just not in the area you want.

I bought a house in Canada with a liquid net worth of $75k (admittedly, 2 years ago, but still). 15 minute drive to a major city’s downtown, 0.3 acres, 3 bed 1 bath with an attached garage. Is it the nicest house? No, but it’s a house, and I’d much rather pay a mortgage than rent.

With a net worth of a million USD, I could buy a house pretty much anywhere in this country, comfortably, and we’re known to have one of the highest costs of living in major cities in the western world. If you move almost literally anywhere from where you currently live, you can definitely afford a house.

Your net worth is far above the median. If taxes increase, you are likely to lose wealth, not gain it.

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...

If you have 1m in liquid assets, you could outright buy 2 houses within easy drive of Austin, or a (smaller) high rise condo right in the middle of downtown.

When have increased taxes directly contributed to your take home pay?

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

It truly is embarrassing. Imagine seeing something and thinking, "how can I get the government to forcefully take some of that for my benefit?"

It’s not very thinly veiled

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?

Yes you have missed something but don’t worry about it.

When health insurance is 10x cheaper because of it.

What's a $NET shareholder?

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!

But then I wouldn't know how utterly badass this guy is, shooting around those sweet ticker designations that all us plebs wouldn't recognise.

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

TIL that stocks can have a "$" in their code.

This is so cool. But the keyboard disturbed me, wouldn’t you at least want a mechanical keyboard?

> Keyboard: Logitech K120 Wired — The world's cheapest keyboard at $13 a pop. Works perfectly fine for all gaming needs.

I can’t imagine playing stuff like overwatch on a membrane office keyboard for $13 when having spent more than 100k on the setup. Especially when cheap mechanical keyboards are not that much more expensive either.

Honestly I've never felt it made any difference to me when gaming. I would never code on such a keyboard but for the old WASD it seems fine.

That said, guests are welcome to bring any peripherals they want. There's a USB hub at each station to plug stuff in.

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.

Generally it's fine - in the 1990s barely anyone had a mechanical keyboard. Instead, game developers learned to test their products on the most common keyboard models. That's why so many games use WASD+Shift+Ctrl+Alt+Space and a handful of other keys in that area.

It doesn't look like they're hoping to play split-screen fighting games with both players using the same keyboard :)

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

Mechanical keyboards aren't automatically great or durable. I've had various die on me. One from sitting in a drawer, probably corrosion. And it's not even always the keys/switches, electronics can degrade too and firmware can be horrendously buggy.

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

Why spend money on something so subjective? If you care about peripherals at all, a $13 basic keyboard is just as bad as a randomly chosen mechanical keyboard. Neither is likely to your taste :)

I've gamed on old keyboards, membrane keyboards, mechanical gaming keyboards (for a long time), and now... I purchased a Logitech MX keys mini wireless keyboard (no numpad) and MX Master 3S mouse and game with those.

Using the 2.4GHz logi bolt usb receiver when I'm on PCs or server (way easier than bringing cables to the garage), and bluetooth for my phone or Steam Deck. I was initially repelled by the half-size arrow keys, for use in terminal or certain games that don't use WASD, but I made up my mind, and I'm really fine like this. Hope it lasts, but generally Logitech peripherals do.

I also have to switch peripherals from gaming PC to work laptop every day, so wireless really helps put less cables on my desk. And I can bring it with me should I need to keyboard away from home, but usually I'm AFK when not at home.

For starters, it's a generic choice that's likely similar to what many used in school computer labs. No bikeshedding over which type of switches to get; that can be a very taste-specific choice. I might have missed it but wonder if there are any house rules against bringing your own mouse/keyboard.

Edit: kentonv replied answered before I hit submit. BYOK/M if you want, nice.

The noise of a room full of mechanical keyboards, dear god.

Me, I bought a mechanical keyboard but I despise it. Switched to a Logitech Keys.

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 ;)

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.

> Jade and I needed a bigger house, but we really could not afford to buy (much less build) anything bigger in Palo Alto.

I’m really surprised about this, really shows how ludicrous the housing market is in the Bay Area. How high does your income need to be to afford a bigger house?!

Also considering 1400 sq ft (130 sq m) too small to raise a family is peak American... That's bigger than 99.9% of apartments people live in in Europe and raise a family just fine.

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)!

1400 sq ft is a large terraced house in London and will cost over 1m GBP (so about 1.4m USD).

Yeah, 1400 as "small" is very US oriented :). But having grown up in the US, I really miss the space of the houses.

One issue with wanting a big house in Palo Alto is that most of the lots there are fairly small. There's not that many lots that can accomodate a larger home, so at best there's not many options, and sometimes there are none.

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.

Wow, this is beyond badass. Not only is the LAN and home network setup top-notch, that location is excellent too - what a view! Congrats on the amazing LAN setup and such a fun place to enjoy some gaming with your friends & family. Truly worthy of some envy, that's for sure :) Looks like it was a good chunk of work, but 110% worth it!

We also have two friends with dedicated LAN party basements. But it's way more casual. They have 10 old office PCs each that were available for pretty much free. We meet around every two months to play old games. Stuff like Half Life 1 DM.

I,ve also started playing with Linux and Lutris to pre-install old games. Still need to figure out the netboot part.

Also regarding the Steam / Epic situation: Steam has a PC Café program where you can buy licenses which then can be used by people with their own steam accounts while they are in your local network. I set it up once and it is a neat feature.

I doubt it took 30 minutes for that Maine Coon to map the place, figure out the cat doors, and hang out above the upstairs hdtv.

No crowds tho'. They steer clear. Probably why it doesn't show up in any of the multi-player photos.

But the upstairs photo of Kenton was prime for the cat to make its way along the back of the couch, gradually step down one paw at a time, and join him nestled at his side.

I don't consider myself much of a cat person. But Maine Coons are terrific animals.

> [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/

In the winter in a normal European/northern US climate, you probably want sunlight streaming into an empty room to reduce the heating bill.

Possibly never in Austin, TX: I am not too privy to the temperatures it gets down to in the winter, though heating was brought up too.

Yeah good idea. We do have electric shades on many of the windows... I just need to rig up some software control of them. I suppose as an experiment I could leave them all down for a day and see how much power it saves. The shades are on the inside of the glass, but light-colored, so should reflect back a fair amount of light.

That's awesome! Unfortunately it's all "request a quote". Can you shed some light on how much you paid?

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".

I love the catwalk that's actually for cats, the little cat doors and cat restrooms. Nice to see some cat-friendly architecture. Very cool.

First of all, great article. I loved how you added all images with captions right upfront without adding boring descriptions that no one would read. At the end you added all the faqs, i loved this format l. Also i loved lan parties in early 2000. I used to run acm chapter at my college andwe used to have lan parties in college.

This is truely living the dream, well done mate! It is indeed crazy that cabinetry costs the same as the technology.

How does the cat restroom exhaust work? Always on or does it have a sensor?

Do the cat doors prevent sound getting into the kids' rooms from the living room?

The cat room fans are standard bathroom fans. At present we just leave them on all the time -- you can see the switches taped down in the photos. I suppose it might be a good idea to rig up a sensor...

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.

I would recommend to use an TVOC sensor that detects smell very easily and then automatically switch on a fan. Could be a fun project.

Just need: - TVOC sensor like the SGP41

- ESP32 microcontroller

- Electric Relay

Garply had a blockage once and he did a remarkably good job of communicating the problem to us directly!

I did wonder where the network connections were going into the cat areas!

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 lot of newer building codes require fans to be constantly running anyway due to the other part of the building codes requiring high r-value insulation.

Yeah that's a good point, I should turn off the fans for a day and see if it changes the power use...

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

This is super freaking cool. I'm curious how you feel about Austin vs Bay Area in terms of general quality of life, culture, things like that?

It feels pretty similar, but more chill. Distances are shorter. The sky doesn't fill with smoke for a week every year. The weather is much more interesting -- honestly I got really bored with Bay Area weather after 15 years. I even like the heat in the summer, in short intervals. There are enough tech people here to be interesting, but not enough that a random person you meet on the street is likely to be in tech.

One thing I appreciate is that there is tons of building happening. Housing prices went up during the pandemic, but there is new housing being built everywhere you look, and as a result the prices are now going down quite a bit! (Which I'm fine with, even as a homeowner, because I wasn't planning to sell anytime soon anyway and I like to see problems getting solved.) The downtown skyline keeps changing -- the tallest tower when I arrived is now hardly notable!

All that said I'm not sure I personally am very affected by where I live. When I moved from Minneapolis to the Bay Area, people asked me if it was a culture shock, but all I really noticed was less snow and more left turn lanes...

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.

I do a lot of biking, and TBH I've had an easier time finding enjoyable bike routes near my house in Austin than I did in Palo Alto. During the summer I go biking at dawn and it's great, and during the winter there are usually 70-degree days regularly enough.

Of course, on that measure, Minneapolis blows both of them out of the water -- at least during the half of the year when biking is enjoyable.

I’ve made this same observation which might explain why there is such a divergent world view between people living in different parts of the country.

A neighbor of mine recently moved (back to) Texas. Where we live is 1/4 of a mile from a massive state park, right on the ocean full of mountainous trails. Dude admitted he had only visited it once in 5+ years, but complained about taxes and the price of gas constantly. It’s no wonder he wanted to go back.

Related to culture, I moved to Austin in 2012 and that was the first time I saw a restaurant advertising that their water had no fluoride.

Are people in Austin more concerned about fluoride?

I have never seen nor heard any mention of fluoride in Austin, FWIW.

I mean, maybe I just don't hang out with that crowd. But I do go to restaurants and haven't ever seen it mentioned.

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.

This is factually incorrect. In fact recent studies show that up to 25% of cavities are still prevented by fluoridating water. On top of that, multiple Canadian cities are adding fluoride back in their water after 10 years of having it removed because of excellent evidence that the lack of fluoridation in the water is what led to the increase in cavities in those cities, since they had neighboring cities who kept fluoride in the water during the same period

Where is the guy duck taped to the ceiling?

Yeah, gotta pay the homage tax, where the homage tax is due

It’s one thing to build a house like this, if you can actually host a LAN party with friends and max out occupancy at every game station you are rich in life.

The amount of thought that's gone into that cat lavatory really makes me envy your belief in yourself. Here I am rewriting my dB schema 4 times.

All this is truly, truly outstanding, except for one bit:

> Cat doors allow cats access to bedrooms when human doors are closed.

Kenton, you have made a grave mistake.

Hopefully the cat doors can be locked too!

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.

Fair, definitely depends on the cat(s). Our cats will frequently decide to start rough-housing on the bed at 3am, so unfortunately we have to keep them out of the bedroom at night lest our sleep quality suffers drastically. They also need to be kept out for "adult playtime", because otherwise they like to get involved and that isn't the vibe we're going for.

Those cat corridors are cool as shit. I love little doors and hidden hallways, it's almost victorian. I would only worry about "noise" leaking out of the bedrooms...

> but it's still a disturbing amount of energy usage and something I'm trying to debug

As someone who is deeply frustrated with their HVAC this stood out to me. A new home should have exterior insulation. Plus the solar panels plus "efficient heat pumps". I would expect it to perform very well.

I'm curious to know the square footage and how much power is being used. Did you have a blower door test done when the home was constructed?

5200 sqft. There are 5 heat pumps which seem to combine for an average 10kW power usage, with considerably less variation through the day than I would expect.

Yes, they did blower door tests.

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...

How did you deal with the length of the USB and display cables? I thought after 5m or so things would start falling apart. Are there active extenders and can they can handle 240+ Hz?

Yes, Monoprice sells a brand called "SlimRun" which actually convert the signal to fiber optic and can handle 100ft runs for USB, DisplayPort, and HDMI. They are pricey but they work.

I haven't tried 240Hz, but I have successfully run 7680x2160 wide screen at 120Hz (using HDMI), and 4k144Hz (using DisplayPort).

Not OP, but he website addresses this: https://lanparty.house/#cable-latency

Thanks, somehow I missed that entry.

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...

That's frigging awesome!! I really admire the thought and attention to detail that went into this. Must've cost a good fortune, but what better way to spend it having fun? Your friends seem like a blast too.

And also, thanks for Cloudflare Workers :) One of my favorite tech tools of all time.

Wait, why do you have the same living room as Bojack Horseman?

Lol, never seen it before, but looking now, yeah it looks kinda similar!

I think these are cool and seeing the NetBoot + CoW setup for gaming is fun.

Thanks for sharing!

Man, This looks really awesome! However I have some questions. 1. Do you plan CPU overclocking of your gaming rigs? I'm asking because on so many PCs it doesn't seem realistic, so why did you go with 13600KF CPU instead of cheaper 13500/13600 non-K CPU? Also, If you don't plan overclocking didn't you through about going with cheaper B760 Motherboard + 10Gbit/s NIC? 2. Why did you choosed so slow memory? These i5 can benefit a lot in gaming from fast memory such as 7200MT/s+. 6000MT/s CL30 would probably be at same price as your kit, while providing nice performance boost in games. 3. How does Key rollover work for you on K120? Can you use Shift + W + 1 key combo for example? Just asking, because some people on Internet say such combo won't work on later batches of K120.

In this setup what I really appreciate is that you didn't go with Virtualized PCs route (that causes a lot of problems with modern video games) and so much amemities for your cat :)

I don't recall what the price difference between K and non-K was at the time. I'm not a big fan of overclocking but I think the price difference must have been negligible. Or it might have been that the only "F" options (no-integrated-GPU) available at the time were also "K". Obviously I did not want an integrated GPU.

We did have a lot of fun when building the computers seeing how many "biscuits" each one reported. I guess this is some sort of measure of overclockability provided by Gigabyte motherboards, but we pretended it was a direct measure of how well the person assembling the computer did and congratulated or made fun of each other depending on the results.

The motherboard I got was literally the cheapest board that had a 10G NIC at the time. In retrospect maybe I should have bought separate 10G NICs.

Memory timing is a world I haven't gotten deeply into. I didn't spend a lot of time researching the RAM.

Key rollover hasn't been an issue. I have been using these cheap keyboards for gaming for a long time (had them in the old house too) and I simply have never had the experience of it not registering a keystroke due to too many keys being pressed. I'm pretty sure I commonly am holding shift and W and also press another key... though then again, I do tend to map commonly-used actions to mouse buttons...

Extraordinary home! Great design. Especially love the cat stuff. I have to say, it’s wild that something “moderate” like an i5 / 4070 build is so powerful these days. It’s middle of the line in this era but it’s enough to play practically anything.

Also, this is a classic example of the power of leverage. $200k down on a $1m home, home goes to $2m gives you a $1m profit on ~$240k. Accidental, in this case, but nice.

to see that upside on a home requires you 1. sell and 2. buy somewhere cheaper (or not buy at all) ... Otherwise it's a zero sum game. Home for a home.

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.

Given it's only 20 pcs, I might have just opted for fully local machines with a basic disk overlay software with exceptions for where Steam and Epic live. Course, engineering a centralized solution can be fun, but locked-down PCs are just simple. Having built corporate RDP and VDI solutions I'm just biased towards keeping things simple these days and pushing admin work off myself.

Going off the local PC only idea, you could script just your rebuilds of them in the off chance something goes south, along with maybe a disk image with the majority of common games loaded. This is just thinking along the lines it's friends and family, not the general public. I'd probably use gigabit Internet (or more) which makes updates you're missing fast, while Steam lets PCs on a LAN share updated files and save bandwidth.

Did you consider patch panels or things like PatchBox to organize those UTP cables or allow for changes in your switching later?

Hmm, that sounds like a lot more maintenance work to me.

The way I have it set up, I am essentially maintaining only one PC, in a totally normal way. I update Windows by pulling up Windows Update in the control panel, etc. Since I only have to do it for one machine this is fine -- orchestrating updating 20 machines sounds like a pain. Yeah I know there are enterprise tools for this but why bother?

Once I've updated that one machine I just run one command on the server and now all the machines have cloned it. At the end of the party I run one command and all the machines are reverted.

Also I can give everyone full admin access to their machine (which you sometimes need for games) and not have to worry about it, because I know it'll all be completely reverted later.

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 ?

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...

Not gonna lie, this is really dope! Can I be your friend and drive from Houston for a LAN Party?

He answers this in the FAQ. You’ve got to get into his friend group or get hired by Cloudflare. Not sure which is more challenging!

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.

Amazing build, and even better, a set of long time friends. You and your wife are rich in all senses.

I was wondering what the maximum power draw you have seen. Do you monitor your energy usage during normal use and during a party with all machines buzzing.

I haven't actually monitored power usage during parties. But I should do that at the next one... I have better equipment for than now that since we finished the solar install!

I suspect though that even when the game machines are running they probably don't draw all that much power compared to the HVAC. We seem to have ~10-12kW going to HVAC throughout the day... this feels broken to me (these are supposed to be high-efficiency heat pumps and such) but I haven't been able to figure out what's wrong yet.

Whereas if all the computers were drawing the theoretical maximum their PSUs support (750W each) that would be 15kW, but in practice I suspect they draw a small fraction of that most of the time, even when in-game.

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).

You're living the dream, man.

my favorite part is the cat walk with the doors to the rooms, how cool! treehouse vibes.

I assume this is also a CF PoP?

I’m surprised people still have LAN parties.

My lan parties were more adhoc. Plan to play at some dudes/gals house, bring pcs/laptops/consoles and other gear, run cat5 cable between rooms, hook them up to some shitty switch and go to town. Many hours of sweaty gameplay. Piss off the neighbors. Trip a few circuit breakers.

This “lan party” has such a corporate feel to it. Almost reminds me of a typical work office. Just what I need after grinding it for 5 hrs and commuting home for another 1-2 hr — to experience the work environment again!

I’m actually more interested in the dedicated cat walk and doors that lead into various rooms.

>My lan parties were more adhoc. Plan to play at some dudes/gals house, bring pcs/laptops/consoles and other gear, run cat5 cable between rooms, hook them up to some shitty switch and go to town.

Those are almost impossible to organize once your friends are old enough to have kids. OP's removes all of the friction in getting a lan party together and just works.

This is amazing. In today's world, I'm not sure what's more prohibitive though. Finding 20 friends who play video games and would be into LAN parties or being able to pay for this kind of setup.

Do you run Linux or Windows?

The server is Linux but the game machines are Windows.

But I am going to try switching the game machines to Linux at some point. I can't tell you how many times I've run into what were almost showstopper problems with the whole iSCSI netboot thing with Windows, only to get really lucky with some registry hack that worked around it. I'm sure it's going to just stop working at some point. Whereas with Linux I can dig into the stack and make things work however I want.

In fact, in the old Palo Alto house, when I first completed it in 2011, the game stations were Linux for the first six months. In theory it was a better setup because the machines were able to use their local disks for the copy-on-write overlay (this was easy to set up with an initrd script and Device Mapper). With Windows, I haven't figured out how to utilize the local disk at all -- so all the copy-on-write overlays are on the server side, which of course wastes server resources.

Of course, the problem with Linux is game support. We got a long way with WINE in 2011 but there were just a few too many issues. Here in 2024, Linux is ostensibly a much more capable gaming platform, with Steam support, Proton, etc. So maybe it'll work better this time?

Anyway, just another project on the todo list...

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.

That’s awesome, a pretty neat setup! I also strongly advise you to buy a projector - they became so good that’s nuts. Makes a much bigger screen and there are almost no cons.

This is amazing! I’ve been into LAN parties since the 90s but stopped going after the early 2000s, so seeing this brought back a ton of memories. The 2011 photos hit me with nostalgia—so much of it feels like the LAN parties I remember. The 2024 setup looks awesome too, though the vibe has clearly evolved. It’s incredible you’ve kept this tradition alive for 30 years! A photo series of your LAN parties over the decades would be fascinating.

Hack the planet!

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...

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.

No, my chair was the one seen at the very end. (The first/last room in the video was my bedroom so I was sitting at my regular desk.)

> The machines all boot off of a network drive based on this image. Each machine gets a copy-on-write overlay on top of the main image, so that guests can make changes to their machine which won't be seen by any other, and will be deleted at the end of the party.

How do you deal with Windows licensing/activation in that scenario? I didn't see anything in the Github repository, and I can't imagine that not being the worst PITA.

Just buy licenses once on each machine and Windows figures it out from then on. I guess it phones home when it sees a hardware change and the server says "yep that serial number is licensed".

At least, that's how it worked for me in Palo Alto. For some reason with the new setup Windows complains about activation after every reimage, until I click "troubleshoot activation", and then it phones home and figures it out? I need to debug this.

That is an awesome house and a great story. I'd be really curious to know what the people who bought your house in Palo Alto did with the house (and did you leave the gear with it? It looks like you bought all new computers for the new place so ...)

I'm curious too how the planning folks reacted when you got the permits. I would expect Austin to go more smoothly than Palo Alto but that would be interesting to know about too.

> I'd be really curious to know what the people who bought your house in Palo Alto did with the house

I don't really know. I never spoke with them directly (real estate agents like to avoid that...). I did leave the equipment, but the buyer was a family and my impression was that they weren't particularly interested in the LAN setup, so it's possible they ripped it all out.

I looked up the house on street view and they have a Tesla parked in the front yard (on dirt/grass) which strikes me as a hilarious combination of Bay Area and hillbilly. (There is a carport in the back of the house, I don't know why they aren't using it!)

Anyway, the computers were a bit outdated so I don't think it would have been useful to bring them with us.

> I would expect Austin to go more smoothly than Palo Alto but that would be interesting to know about too.

Loooooooool, no. Austin was actually much worse. It took six months! Though it was in the middle of the pandemic, maybe that was part of it.

But the plans as submitted for permitting didn't really show any of the LAN party stuff so there really wasn't anything unusual to react to.

> The cabinetry around the game stations cost a similar amount to the computers powering them. Think about that! The cabinetry is just a bunch of wood, cut into fairly large pieces. Maybe a few screws and hinges.

As a person redoing a kitchen, I am disappointed that each cabinet costs something like a thousand dollars. They've gotta be doing something wrong. The prices make no sense to me; this is centuries old technology, and wood is abundant. How can they not optimize it?!

It's the "custom" part that's very expensive. If you just want some wooden boxes with doors for you to hang on the wall and paint yourself you can get those for <$200/ea. If you want a crew of people to measure your space, design cabinets specifically for your space, cut out a specific order just for your one-off design, install them, and paint them that's a lot more labor charge. Labor is way more expensive than wood.

On a more serious side - with WFH now very common, perhaps new builds should contain office-like spaces with plugs everywhere, integrated desks, etc.

Maybe companies could rent these for team building weekends that mix social and work.

Perhaps friends who all work for different companies could spend a working vacation in a house like this?

What starts as a fun idea can often become a serious business!

Awesome! The fold up mechanism is a great idea to make it look clean, when there is no party and it also saves the hardware from dust :D

The biggest surprise for me was seeing the desks with no mouse pads (or if you wanted to build it into the cabinet you'd probably want to stick down a desk pad).

But I also in my circles everyone takes their own keyboard/mouse/pad/headphones as those are the things it's hard to adjust to - admittedly my priorities could be completely different.

I mostly haven't used a mouse pad in decades... until recently. I now have a mouse pad on my main work desk because the wood where my mouse was kept attracting weird black spots. They were easy to clean off but weirded me out. And I guess it would be sad if I ended up with a permanent wear spot...

But I think the LAN parties don't really happen often enough to cause much wear. In 10 years at the old place no one used mouse pads and it was never an issue.

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.

This is an extremely clever setup and certainly looks wonderful - but to me LAN parties are only LAN parties when people bring the computers with them (in much the same way that Champaign is only Champaign when from a certain place in France). That being said it looks wonderful and I hope it gives you and your community many years of enjoyment.

I thought that too originally! This is covered in the Q&A:

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

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.

Random thought: would a gaming streaming service like GeForce Now achieve a similar result for a lan party? Assuming you have the network bandwidth, I am curious what the difference in input lag/quality would be, and if, when doing a blind test, anyone would notice.

I guess you could even test this, by running GeForce Now on all computers vs native.

Ehh... I'm very skeptical of those streaming services.

I tried Stadia once. Played Celeste. The results were very interesting. I didn't exactly perceive latency, but I did perceive that the game felt wrong. As a result, my favorite game of all time was not fun when playing on Stadia. If I didn't have the local version of the game to compare against, I would probably have blamed the game, because again, it didn't feel like latency was the problem.

I dunno, maybe that experience was skewed by the fact that Celeste is probably one of the most timing-sensitive games out there and I'd played it a lot... but now I'm worried that anything played via one of these streaming services is just going to be subtly less fun. I think I'll stick to local gaming.

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.

That could be the poor's man, on-demand, lan party.

If not for the PCs, you would still need some devices to run the games.

What DDR pads are those? Are they custom made?

They are L-TEK Ex Pro X. Shipped all the way from Poland!

They seem to work pretty well. Have been using them frequently for more than a year with no issues yet.

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!

damn if I had this kinda money I'd do something crazy. like pay off my parent's mortgage.

Only thing I'm surprised about is the intel+nvidia combo not an AMD/AMD or AMD+Nvidia combo

The amazing thing about gaming is, if you build for it, everything else works.

Due to high specs and amazing connectivity, video meetings, coding, dev work all run great. Sure some xeon or threeadrippers would be better but still. Networking is key, use cables whenever possible.

I'm building a game that I think would do quite well in a LAN party setting. If I ever finish it (big if) I'll be sure to get your attention and see if you'd give it a try :)

Thanks for sharing all the details on this, looks like an incredibly fun and nice house.

Damn... I read those profiles and I feel sick. I wasted my life on reddit, youtube and forums.

> Normally, maintaining twelve machines used by random guests would have two huge problems:

Maybe you did this with your other house but I would have thought guests would bring their own computer to a LAN party. All you have to do is provide the space and network capability?

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

Dumb question but what are you using to transfer gaming quality video and usb signal over long distance like this? I tried a fiber cable from Infinite Cables earlier this year for a similar situation but couldn’t get it quite working.

Monoprice SlimRun cables -- they have USB, DisplayPort, and HDMI. They transmit over fiber optic and seem to work just fine even at 100ft.

Amazing setup, thanks for the write-up! My dream house if I was rich would have a LAN party room like this (plus a mini fridge stocked with Bawls Guarana). Stretch goal would be a movie theater like Brandon Sanderson has in his lair.

Looking at this I was making noises like Homer Simpson looking at donuts.

I love this idea so much.

Lan parties were probably the best part of my teenage years.

Also, the terrace part is amazing.

I miss the good old days of playing DotA (the old one) the whole night while drinking coke and eating pizza with friends.

A PC bang in your house?[1] Why not?

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

Has anyone done this on smaller scale? Say 4 or 8 stations?

We have space in our basement. And with our kids getting into pre-teen/teen years, I think it'd be fun to have a place for lan parties.

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

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

Thanks for the backstory to your career success! While I see the money as awesome, just working for CF at such a level must be great. I hope to get a job with them one day!

I salute your commitment to fun and friends, this is awesome.

Extraordinary and beautiful house, thanks for sharing.

Do you worry about the upgrade cycle on the hardware? Can't be fun replacing the CPU in lots of machines :D

In 9 years in the Palo Alto house, the only things I ever upgraded were GPU and RAM, and things seemed to work out fine. So I'm not too worried about it, no.

That said, I do regret the motherboard choice, and I suppose if I ever resort to replacing them then it's a fine time to upgrade everything else. Hope it doesn't come to that though.

Hahaha, the anecdote about the subcontractor is great.

What a thoughtfully designed space for your family and friends! I feel like going this custom is pretty rare, and you’re clearly getting the value out of it. I also love that you did the math on the cable runs making essentially no difference.

Thanks for sharing :)

Nice work mate. I hope it all makes you happy!

Sweet setup! I'm curious if you use the machines for anything when it isn't being used for a LAN party.

We'll turn on one or two to play games ourselves. E.g. my 5-year-old is currently playing Portal 2 at the station next to me.

But otherwise, no, not really. At least not so far.

Fun story: When I built the house in Palo Alto in 2011, people asked me if I was using the machines to mine Bitcoin. I said "What's Bitcoin?" I should have been mining Bitcoin.

> I miss the old MX518.

Truely the peak of mouse design.

Just so you know the 518 is back in production as of a couple years ago with an updated sensor. It is by far the best mouse ever made, still to this day.

For me it is the MS intellimouse

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

Awesome build. I also really enjoyed reading about you. Wish you both all the best :)

Cheers, to many GGs at the LAN parties.

> RGB: None

I chuckled.

Love the creativity and dedication to the project. And really cool house.

Beautiful. All of it. I love it when tech brings people together.

Younger me thinks this is really awesome. This was my DREAM during Halo 2 years. Kudos. The design, the hardware, the room itself. The house is beautiful. The pictures and write ups are fantastic.

Feel free to ignore the next part of my comment:

Current me with lived experiences and knowledge of the world thinks it’s a little disgusting. I don’t think it’s your fault, or you’re intending to do that. I don’t think YOU’RE disgusting. Just flaunting wealth in your own nerdy gamer way which many wealthy people are wont to do. I don’t blame you. If I could afford a 7 figure house and 150k for an adult playhouse I don’t think I’d say no. The computer hardware alone being outdated and turning into e-waste soon enough while people including children sleep and starve in the streets just rubs me the wrong way.

Anybody remember Rich Kids of IG?

Anyway. I wouldn’t feel right with myself if I didn’t say something. I don’t think you did anything wrong, you are a product of your environment as am I. I won’t check responses to this comment just putting it out there is enough for me. Enjoy your LAN parties dude!

Normally, I’d be equally upset with excess but the fact that this is somewhat of a community building thing is actually refreshing to see from the wealthy (even if by community, it is just friends).

It’s mild in comparison to the ultra rich. Jeff bezos, Larry Ellison, and Elon musk have more wealth than half of America. That fact is what we should truly be upset about. In comparison this is a drop on the ocean.

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 wouldn’t feel right with myself if I didn’t say something.

Many people live with not feeling right with themselves.

What makes you think he is flaunting his wealth? Maybe he is just showing this implementation to help people with ideas.

And saying you won't check responses to your comment is pure arrogance. Unlike the original poster who seems a nice guy.

Rock and Stone OP!!!

Rock and Stone!!

The 22 game machines (including monitors, cables, and peripherals) cost about $75,000 in total. The house overall was a 7-digit number. Sorry, I'm not comfortable being any more specific than that.

No mention of air conditioning? That basement is going to reek with so many sweaty nerds in there grinding and stinking away on their gamestations for hours on end.

i really enjoy seeing and reading content like this. the way the process is developed and worked on by the team

So we have an ongoing debate in the white collar world - work in the office or work at home. I am firmly on the “teams work better in physical proximity camp” but there are still many better ways to arrange that physical space

And this - the hideaway desks that fold down to become a table top gaming session, well that could make much more flexible office spaces. (Don’t get me started on offices with one or two desks and doors that shut !)

But yeah, I like it, even if my house has that many people in I would probably just hide in the kitchen all night

This is super awesome, congrats!

Invite LinusTechTips now!!!

It's a tangent but I think two white collar workers being able to afford this and having this lifestyle is why Trump won.

Can you clarify? Trump got them rich parents and hired at tech startups before they exploded? In 2005? And because wealthy people can afford expensive homes, the people of America voted Trump?

cat

how do I join? :D are you guys hiring at cloudflare per chance?

This. is. awesome!

Beautiful house, great ideas, love the stow-away workstations -- no patch panel in the network rack facepalm

House, or room?

House itself looks amazing, LAN room? Meh. I kinda like PC Bang aesthetic more than some 90s alike cabinets for monitors.

I wish I was rich too.

He seems like he has a really good attitude about it.

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

Now in addition to feeling poor whenever I open social media, I can also feel poor when I open HN (-‿-")

I appreciated the transparency in the "Where did you get the money?" section of the website.

Must be nice to be stinking rich

If your goal is to have what he has, you can make it happen in 5-10 years. A decent job or hardcore hustling (sell something), you can make 200k a year and have all the things he has. Not that difficult.

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

Such a cool house, too bad it’s in Texas

How much does it cost? Probably can only be pay be Musk, Wall and Gates

Nope, USD 150k (for stations & cabinetry): https://lanparty.house/#cost

Fake news.

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

Not just those, but probably not too far off, either.

Not the best use of resources considering we are in a housing crisis. Another thing on the list of things wealthy people think they need...

Once you've made the money, better to spend it on building materials and (local) labor than keeping it in the bank or investing in Dubai nonsense projects or NFTs, don't you think?

Flipside: they created more housing, in a place where people want it. He even said prices in Austin are falling because of development.

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