[bpchaps]

Shameless plug.

Can't speak too much for it just yet (working through sponsorships, etc), but some friends and I are setting up a 160p LAN in Chicago later this year. It's particularly neat since we're not the only ones to have similar goals. LANs are coming back ;).

We also do ~monthly LANs out in Wauconda (Chicago suburbs) area if anybody's interested.

Here's just some preliminary stuff we've been working on. The switch we have is the same as LHC's: http://imgur.com/a/BICDK

[ra1n85]

That's awesome.

What's your approach to internet connectivity and wifi? How much power are you budgeting for?

[bpchaps]

I can't speak much for the power setup since I'm on the networking/infrastructure side, but it's pretty hefty and accounted for with tons of wiggle room. The switch alone is a decent chunk of the power. Back when we were setting it up in winter, it was able to heat a full house while sitting idle :).

For bandwidth, I'll be setting up an http cache server this weekend so that steam downloads (at least) can be retrieved locally as often as possible. The internet we have is 100Mb/s, which I personally think is more than plenty if managed correctly. We'd like the network and its capabilities to pretty much be as open as possible with a noticeable disclaimer that traffic can easily be intercepted and that Bad Stuff won't be tolerated. Ideally, we'd want the network to be as old school LAN-y as possible, which means that we unfortunately have to make some security compromises. We're going to place heavy restrictions on southbound traffic coming in, but northbound is going to be pretty limited. That said, we haven't set it up entirely yet, so we'll probably change a lot as we go.

We haven't really talked about wifi that much, but I've heard more and more that ubiquiti routers are incredible for the price. We'll probably buy two or three decent ones.

[wtallis]

Ubiquiti APs are nice if you want to use PoE or if you need a pre-packaged solution to manage a large number of them. They won't offer better wireless performance than cheaper consumer routers running OpenWRT/LEDE that use the same radios.

Ubiquiti's routers are overrated.

[leonroy]

> Ubiquiti's routers are overrated.

Why say that?

I'm a pfSense fanboi but was planning on recommending Ubiquiti kit for those not happy about spending the money to get pfSense capable hardware.

[wtallis]

Ubiquiti's wired-only routers tend to be more expensive than a consumer wireless router with the same or better processor that can also be an access point. The EdgeRouter products are highly reliant on relatively inflexible packet processing hardware offloads that make it impossible to do things like use QoS/AQM techniques that are more modern than the CPU design, so their impressive specs won't necessarily translate to competitive real-world performance. (Not that it would matter when you use a BSD-derived router OS that hasn't been keeping up with those advancements.)

[markglenn]

As a fellow northern suburbanite (Grayslake), I'd love to hear about the Wauconda LAN parties.