Playtime + Pause = powah!?

[affro]

We have a venue in Cathcart which can hold about 100-120 folks, I was wondering it anyone knows of anywhere in the Uni grounds we could use to host a similar sized event.

We have a network which can support 160 on a 2Gb backbone and 4 Dedi servers all with dual nic's for load balancing.

Thoughts?


Affro.

[Bluepixie]

lo, nice to see you on the forum again man! :D

Sounds like a great idea! The venue we normally use only holds about 30-40 people. Is hard to tell exactly as the SRC have been using the room as a dumping ground this past year. :? However, the hall downstairs is quite a bit bigger, but not 100 - 120 though, maybe about 80 odd. There are other halls in the Uni that we haven't looked though such as the Hunter Halls, which are flipping massive! I don’t know what hoops I would have to jump though to get them but I shall investigate. I'm going to be away this week so I can't do much but I'm sure that the rest of the committee and community will want to talk about this. I hope we can do this, sounds like a winner! :D

[--Mogwai--]

sounds like infy more BF2 players to me !!!! :D :D

[Fyndir]

We have a venue in Cathcart which can hold about 100-120 folks, I was wondering it anyone knows of anywhere in the Uni grounds we could use to host a similar sized event.

As Pixie said, there's plenty of big halls in the Uni, but it might be a bit of work to get permission to use them, also you'd possible have a bundle of stipulations about food, drink and similar, which could mean extensive cleanups necessary.

Pause-Time Gaming? =P

[CaNNoN_FoDDa]

Im not totally sure, but i seem to remember hunter halls not having many power sockets (ie: just enough to polish the floor without needing an extension lead).

[Captain_Caveman]

Thats a major concern every lan we have. Power points are pants all over the uni, particularly the older buildings where power was put in later as an after thought.

[affro]

As long as we can get access to the main core power we can run a custom PDU from it and run the main's rings from there.

As mentioned earlier, we have network capacity for 160 max at the moment, all Gb and I was told you guys also have a large amount of servers available for game servers.

Cleanup's shouldnt be a problem, we have a team of 8 admins who are not shy of a bit of manual labour, I've been to a few 100+ man lans before like scotlan, Uprising and gumpcom so I have a very good idea on layout, power and network setup.

We have default SRCDS setups for all the Valve games and like you guys have plenty of BF2 Server configs available for hosting, I would absolutly love to see two BF2 64player servers maxed out.

We already have some sponsorship in the way of Thermaltake, Creative computing and AMD, I'm sure with a large hall and a sizable amount of players we could increase that sponsorship.

I dont know if you guys know this but we run a zero profit margin for our lans, everything goes into setup/hire[venue+tables-chairs]/network/prizes and admin pizza's for the weekend, if thats an issue grab me on msn, pm for details.


Affro.

[Captain_Caveman]

Jeeze, you guys actually sound like you know what you are doing, big time. :D Sounds awsome, count me in for any help I can give if you get it off the ground (and I ain't working).

[affro]

It also helps that me and wonderdog are full time network managers in our day to day, sneakyphuck is a web dev and qualified macromedia (adobe) trainer and we have another 2-3 boys who are so clued up on game server setup/config and admin it actually scares me.


Affro.

[Sid]

Hi affro, good to see you on the forums. Recognize your name from Gumpcom.

I feel I'm certainly one of the crowd of people from PauseGaming that would like to expand the LAN but I'm wary about growing *too* fast. If we were to host an 'open-to-all' LAN within the Glasgow University campus it would need to be done under the name of our GU society in order to qualify for free hall use (I know that hiring the bigger halls at GU for the weekend would run to around £2000 - I've enquired about it, myself) and any revenue generated from the LAN would need to be put back into the society, itself.

There are a few questions that still exist as to whether or not we'd be allowed to:
a. have a significant percentage (perhaps even the majority of the LAN) being non-GU.
b. use one of the larger halls in the glasgow university campus for cheap/free.

I believe BluePixie is certainly going to look into these matters, but until we get a decision there, we're looking at making use of the smallish SRC building we have (one room holding 30-35; another holding perhaps 50). Perhaps we could bridge a connection between the 2 rooms to give us a total of ~85, but that comes with the problems of making the connection and having people running around the SRC building between rooms.

If we're expanding as a LAN, new equipment would be required, however, we should be able to cover the necessary equipment upgrades as we grow through the entry fee. Out of interest, do you have a list of the switches etc. that you have, already.

And perhaps the most important point of all, we're a Glasgow University society and it's crucial that we stay as one and have a member-base that is heavily GU weighted, so my opinion is that open-to-all LANs should be run in addition to GU-only ones.

Would be good to hear more of everyone's opinions and ideas on this.

BTW:

I've been to a few 100+ man lans before like scotlan, Uprising and gumpcom

I was under the impression that the recent Gumpcom LAN was the first Scottish LAN to break 100.

[DAve]

There are a few questions that still exist as to whether or not we'd be allowed to:
a. have a significant percentage (perhaps even the majority of the LAN) being non-GU.
b. use one of the larger halls in the glasgow university campus for cheap/free.
Under SRC regulations, I think we're allowed 10% of the entire membership of the student society to be non-students. That's a serious limitation, but not rigidly followed. Perhaps booking 100+ member lans in the uni might be a bit suspicious ;)
See the constitution on the wiki for more details. It's deliberately worded vaguely though.

I've not had a serious chat with the SRC about this, but we've operated under a don't ask, don't tell policy. As far as I can tell, most other clubs do this as well.

And perhaps the most important point of all, we're a Glasgow University society and it's crucial that we stay as one and have a member-base that is heavily GU weighted, so my opinion is that open-to-all LANs should be run in addition to GU-only ones.

Well said.

[affro]

Scotlan did the first 100 man lan in July 2002, uprising lan in livingston did 124 bodies, I have no idea why gumpcom insist they are the first scottish 100 man lan, even one of the admins was at one or two of the 2-3 100 man events that scotlan ran.

It may well be that we have to find an external location for the events, we have contacts for table/chair hire.

Currently we run 7 x netgear pro unmanaged 16 portswitches- http://www.netgear.com/Products/Switches/DesktopSwitches/GS116.aspx - we keep a 16 port switch seperate for the backbone and to plug the servers into, essentially removing the broadcast span increases the speed of the network.

In all honesty there is no need for any layer 3 managed equipment at the moment and were using a hardware dhcp server for simplicity.

Affro.

[Bluepixie]

We currently only have one game server that belongs to the society, there is another (tehe, got love it) which is the old server that belongs to Yega. It's a bit ropy though and is better not to be considered for serving anymore. Sounds like you have the server/network side of things nailed though. :)

This is all sounds rather good. I shall get back to you once I've spoken to the SRC about rooms, non-GU members etc. I suspect I'll get some good and bad answers but I'm confident that we'll we able to team up for an event.