> 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!
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.)
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.
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.
There was always someone who would just be totally unable to connect with someone else.
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...
"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...
It is amazing to think how much IPv4 and IPv6 "just work" in comparison.
That said my first LAN party was 1996 and we were running Windows 95 by that point, which probably helped.
No, I realy don't miss those times :-)
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.
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
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
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.
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 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.
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 :)
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 think my muni fiber install happening this week might have a 10G-baseT handoff, and I've got a port for that open on my switch in the garage. If that works out, that will be neat, but I'll need to upgrade some more stuff to make full use of that.
If you make a decision on a 10G card (SFP or ethernet) I'd like to hear what you picked.
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.
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.
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...
No need to buy new for most computing equipment unless you're looking for the absolute latest and greatest.
> 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.
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).
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.
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!
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.
From the description this sounds like the most elaborate setup I've heard of aside from my own.
> 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.
That said, guests are welcome to bring any peripherals they want. There's a USB hub at each station to plug stuff in.
It doesn't look like they're hoping to play split-screen fighting games with both players using the same keyboard :)
We generally don't play competitively but we do play fast-paced FPS and such and I just don't recall this ever having come up. (We had the same keyboards in the last house FWIW.)
> I recall reading something like 13 keys, and wondering what kind of lunatic tries to press 13 buttons at the same time.
My recollection was wrong though, and most keyboards support at least two keys held down at the same time (plus shift/alt/ctrl).
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.
Edit: kentonv replied answered before I hit submit. BYOK/M if you want, nice.
Me, I bought a mechanical keyboard but I despise it. Switched to a Logitech Keys.
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.
Apparently, based on your earlier post, you bought the noisy kind. That's on you.
Not allowing that kind of mixed usage in the first place completely cuts away all that crap.
ZIRP certainly had something to do with this too! Don’t overlook ridiculous fiscal and monetary policy.
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.
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.
Meanwhile, if you live in the Bay Area, I can totally see "$1M net worth but not really able to buy a house".
Where you choose to live in really does matter a lot. Not to say there aren't issues with property costs, but... come on.
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.
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-...
It's very nature is it's scarcity though. Land is the one thing they don't make more of.
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.
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’.
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.
And yes, life is not fair. But don't waste it, it's finite.
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?
(I want both, but I don't want more taxes to solve the housing problem, because they won't.)
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.
If I'm going to sink that kind of time/money/effort into building a thing, I don't want a landlord to be able to come in and take it away from me with some legal loophole or by raising my rent.
People like the idea of making money. They are used to real estate always increasing in value.
We'll see what happens as boomer demand ages out.
US policy is to make real estate a fundamental part of Americans wealth. It’s worked! Since the policy started we’ve gone from hovering in the 40% homeownership rate to hovering in the mid 60s.
It’s also made housing expensive and homogeneous.
I understand that there may be arguments individually for the decision and emotional safety is one, but it should be based on fact, not myth and misunderstanding.
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.
Unless you're talking about a new kind of wealth tax, but those aren't particularly popular...
“I have never understood why it is ‘greed’ to want to keep the money you have earned but not greed to want to take somebody else’s money.”
Remember it’s all illogical nonsense motivated by Envy which they masquerade as Empathy.
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."
That doesn’t change any of my observations as your comments imply unearned income deserves higher taxation than current is applied, which is what I object to.
and of those hard earned rewards investing them and then sitting at home and watching the S&P increase you mean?
oh wait that’s problematic … let’s take those rewards away for “fairness” .. opps no incentives no meritocracy no prosperity
Have I missed something in this conversation?
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.
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?!
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...
So they don't really need more than a studio anyway. Nor would they clean/maintain it anyway.
Then I remembered… oh yeah, everything is bigger in America (especially in Texas)!
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.
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.
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.
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.
There were several companies when I searched for "shutters OR blinds inside double glazing".
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?
Just need: - TVOC sensor like the SGP41
- ESP32 microcontroller
- Electric Relay
Beautiful home and contents, btw! It seems expensive but more than a few folks would have spent the same money on “nicer marble” or something.
In this day of international men’s day, maybe I should still enquire about your internal mental health, because stress can be discreet, but still, the outer appearance you give from your allocation of time and clarity of mind seems absolutely perfect.
BTW it's not a renovation, we build the house from scratch on an empty lot. :)
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...
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.
Most people I know that are happy with the move to Texas from California are the types that never cared for going outside in the first place. It’s a good place to build a big house and fill it with toys, which is exactly what you’ve done, so nice work there!
In the modern e-bike era, the hills are more accessible, too.
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.
By "too much" a factor of > 10x western safe levels is meant and by "correlated with" is meant a slew of other heavy metals are generally present.
This comes from studies that look at places in China, in Africa, and elsewhere that have unusally high levels of fluoride and other elements naturally occurring in water or as a by product of other industrial processing going on.
Where the problem lies is in the "fill in the missing line" extrapolations that the anti-fluoride folk do to "conclude" that if really high levels of stuff in water makes you stupid and affects your health then it surely must follow that small amounts make you a bit stupid and a bit unhealthy.
This is despite no such evidence existing even given large western populations with meticulously kept water quality and health records in the UK, Canada, Australia, US, etc.
The G20 recommended fluoride levels are safe by all the evidence to date and work to decrease cavity rates.
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?
There's no evidence to suggest that though.
Just evidence that high levels (much higher) of fluoride and other elements in water has an adverse effect.
> Cat doors allow cats access to bedrooms when human doors are closed.
Kenton, you have made a grave mistake.
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.
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?
Yes, they did blower door tests.
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...
I haven't tried 240Hz, but I have successfully run 7680x2160 wide screen at 120Hz (using HDMI), and 4k144Hz (using DisplayPort).
But where are the ceiling duct tape hammocks? http://octanecreative.com/ducttape/walltapings/images/german...
And also, thanks for Cloudflare Workers :) One of my favorite tech tools of all time.
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 :)
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...
Thanks for sharing!
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.
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?
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.
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 don't think that would really work. Not all the changes I make to machines before a party are things that they'd do automatically if just left to sit. E.g. I usually install some new games some people suggested, or download the latest nvidia driver directly from the web site (where they are available before Windows Update gets them), or remove games we aren't playing anymore to free up space (or because they are constantly downloading enormous updates wasting banwidth), etc.
Also, I don't actually leave the machines running outside of parties, and updates don't just all happen immediately when you turn the machine on... I'd have to start them up a few days in advance.
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 ?
Well, OK, admittedly in the latest build, I have some stability issues right after boot. But in the worst case the machine reboots once or twice, and then it works. If it doesn't BSOD in the first five minutes then it's good, and everything works every bit as well as if the storage were local.
Whereas reimaging all the machines would actually take more time than waiting for this stability issue to work itself out. And would also require that I install storage in all the machines big enough to hold the main image (currently, they don't have this).
Overall I find it more convenient this way.
Note that the stability issue is specific to my hardware/drivers -- I didn't have any such problem in the Palo Alto house.
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...
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 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.
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!
Well the people setting up the HVAC definitely ran the numbers accounting for windows, insulation, etc. The resulting system does successfully heat/cool the house.
What I'm a little unclear on is whether it was always expected to use this much power in the process. I've been struggling to get info out of my HVAC contractor, may need to hire someone else to come in and look at it.
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).
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.
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.
Hack the planet!
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...
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.
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...
Would completely bypass the iSCSI setup, and each machine would still get the latest image from your server before the lan party begins.
There have been a decent number of times when I actually did this during a party to fix an issue, or between parties just to keep the machines maintained for the family to play with, etc. It'd be hard to do that if I have to spend hours transferring a large image every time.
Aside from the stability issues at boot time, there isn't really a down side. I don't have any problems with load times. So I'm pretty happy with the setup.
Also, maybe having a steam cache server and using the local disks as a game store might help with installation of games?
Definitely can see the benefits of the netboot setup, though!
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.
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.
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!
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 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.
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?!
> 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.
I guess you could even test this, by running GeForce Now on all computers vs native.
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.
If not for the PCs, you would still need some devices to run the games.
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.
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.
https://www.amazon.com/3M-Precise-Repositionable-Adhesive-MP...
Have the same issue, but can't subscribe to mousepads. I believe that's dust getting in the crevices of the wood.
The close folding furniture is probably great for holding back dust buildup.
They seem to work pretty well. Have been using them frequently for more than a year with no issues yet.
Yeah I have never used the bar. Probably because I learned to play at home, starting on a basic foam pad, and so obviously didn't have the bar available.
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.
Thanks for sharing all the details on this, looks like an incredibly fun and nice house.
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?
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.
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.
Do you worry about the upgrade cycle on the hardware? Can't be fun replacing the CPU in lots of machines :D
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.
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 :)
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.
Cheers, to many GGs at the LAN parties.
Truely the peak of mouse design.
I chuckled.
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!
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.
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.
More equally distributed wealth increases the efficiency of spending (to a point) on the things that society needs to thrive.
Could you elaborate a bit on spending efficiency and how it relates to wealth distribution? I’m unfamiliar with that metric.
Many people live with not feeling right with themselves.
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
I appreciated the transparency in the "Where did you get the money?" section of the website.
> The house overall was a 7-digit number. Sorry, I'm not comfortable being any more specific than that.
Yes. I could never have done any of this without that fact. When you hire an architect, especially for a high-end house, they are incentivized to make expensive design decisions in order to make the house more impressive for their portfolio, and of course the contractor is not going to stop them because they want the money. And if you're just a normal person not experienced in homebuilding, you will not be able to spot what they're doing. I'm sure I would have been taken advantage of if the architect wasn't a family member.
