[HN Gopher] Show HN: I built a(nother) house optimized for LAN p...
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Show HN: I built a(nother) house optimized for LAN parties
 
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
 
Author : kentonv
Score  : 798 points
Date   : 2024-11-16 15:52 UTC (22 hours ago)
 
web link (lanparty.house)
w3m dump (lanparty.house)
 
| anotherhue wrote:
| I assume this is also a CF PoP?
 
| hed wrote:
| I think these are cool and seeing the NetBoot + CoW setup for
| gaming is fun.
| 
| Thanks for sharing!
 
| lostmsu wrote:
| Do you run Linux or Windows?
 
  | kentonv wrote:
  | 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...
 
    | tim-- wrote:
    | 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.
 
      | kentonv wrote:
      | A really neat thing about the netboot setup is it takes
      | zero time to clone the image to all the machines. As soon
      | as I'm done installing updates on one machine, I shut down,
      | run one command that completes instantly, and now I can
      | boot all the machines immediately with that image.
      | 
      | 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.
 
        | tim-- wrote:
        | With multicast, you only need to send the image once to
        | all 20 machines. With 10 gig Ethernet, a 1tb image should
        | be sent in approx 15 minutes.
        | 
        | 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!
 
| f1shy wrote:
| How much does it cost? Probably can only be pay be Musk, Wall and
| Gates
 
  | 082349872349872 wrote:
  | Nope, USD 150k (for stations & cabinetry):
  | https://lanparty.house/#cost
 
    | levzettelin wrote:
    | Fake news.
    | 
    | > The house overall was a 7-digit number. Sorry, I'm not
    | comfortable being any more specific than that.
 
      | renewiltord wrote:
      | You can get that size of home for 2 million in Austin. The
      | work to make it a LAN party home is not that expensive in
      | comparison. The magic for him is that his dad is an
      | architect. The home is very well designed and if you want
      | that kind of design you'll be paying more. Especially if
      | you want the whole thing ready built.
 
        | kentonv wrote:
        | > The magic for him is that his dad is an architect.
        | 
        | 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.
 
  | stavros wrote:
  | Not just those, but probably not too far off, either.
 
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| 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...
 
| xfalcox wrote:
| This is super awesome, congrats!
 
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| 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
 
| lukevdp wrote:
| Love the creativity and dedication to the project. And really
| cool house.
 
| seg_fault wrote:
| 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
 
| GauntletWizard wrote:
| You're living the dream, man.
 
| renewiltord wrote:
| 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.
 
  | somishere wrote:
  | 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.
 
    | renewiltord wrote:
    | 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.
 
      | somishere wrote:
      | Yes! My point is simply that, unlike an investment
      | property, it's often hard to "see" the upside on a home
      | sale. OP appears to have reinvested significantly in the
      | epic new land + gaff, and also makes the point that prices
      | have since been declining in Austin. The fact it's a home
      | means that all this is a bit of an aside to the real
      | transaction.
 
| jgeralnik wrote:
| What DDR pads are those? Are they custom made?
 
  | kentonv wrote:
  | 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.
 
    | jgeralnik wrote:
    | Thanks, those were the main recommendation the last time I
    | looked into it (a few years ago), good to hear you recommend
    | them too!
 
    | manbash wrote:
    | Is Stepmania still the go-to DDR clone? This is very
    | nostalgic. :)
 
| jameskraus wrote:
| 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 :)
 
| srbloom wrote:
| 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?
 
  | kentonv wrote:
  | 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...
 
    | iwontberude wrote:
    | 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.
 
      | kentonv wrote:
      | 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.
 
        | WD-42 wrote:
        | As a fellow cyclist I find this strange. I visited austin
        | to see what the hype was about and left knowing I
        | couldn't live there. Massive 6 lane stroads running
        | through suburban sprawl for miles in every direction.
        | Barely any elevation to speak of. Strangely humid despite
        | there being no water in sight.
        | 
        | 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!
 
        | amluto wrote:
        | I've never biked in Texas, but the routes even a short
        | distance west from Palo Alto are excellent. You need to
        | be willing to go uphill, though :). LAN party house v1
        | would have been maybe 15 minutes from where Page Mill
        | starts to get spectacular, not to mention spectacularly
        | steep.
        | 
        | In the modern e-bike era, the hills are more accessible,
        | too.
 
        | kentonv wrote:
        | Oh I biked down Page Mill and into the hills a lot, that
        | was my main bike route. And yes, it was great. But there
        | was really only one part of those hills that was close
        | enough to get to without driving first. In Austin I have
        | a few more options nearby.
 
      | WD-42 wrote:
      | 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.
 
  | frakkingcylons wrote:
  | 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.
 
    | joenot443 wrote:
    | Are people in Austin more concerned about fluoride?
 
      | kentonv wrote:
      | 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.
 
    | alchemist1e9 wrote:
    | 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.
 
      | blackqueeriroh wrote:
      | 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
 
        | defrost wrote:
        | It's factually correct that _too much_ fluoride is
        | correlated with decreased average IQ.
        | 
        | 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.
 
| mewse-hn wrote:
| Beautiful house, great ideas, love the stow-away workstations --
| no patch panel in the network rack _facepalm_
 
| gloflo wrote:
| I wish I was rich too.
 
  | tptacek wrote:
  | He seems like he has a really good attitude about it.
 
    | pixelatedindex wrote:
    | I too would have a great attitude if I had that much money
    | lol
 
| w-m wrote:
| Wait, why do you have the same living room as Bojack Horseman?
 
  | kentonv wrote:
  | Lol, never seen it before, but looking now, yeah it looks kinda
  | similar!
 
| teruakohatu wrote:
| 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?
 
  | kentonv wrote:
  | 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...
 
    | hunter2_ wrote:
    | 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.
 
      | kentonv wrote:
      | Garply had a blockage once and he did a remarkably good job
      | of communicating the problem to us directly!
 
        | allenrb wrote:
        | As a fellow cat person, I feel pretty confident
        | interpreting what's being implied here. :-)
        | 
        | 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.
 
        | kentonv wrote:
        | Heh, I actively dislike "nice marble" or anything that
        | just looks expensive without providing any functional
        | benefit.
 
      | ahaucnx wrote:
      | 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
 
        | teruakohatu wrote:
        | Interesting idea. Do TVOC respond with enough signal to
        | low level aromatics verses all the particles from cooking
        | or pollution?
 
        | amluto wrote:
        | I'm highly unimpressed by my couple of SGP41 sensors, but
        | they would probably work for this application.
 
    | devenson wrote:
    | 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.
 
      | kentonv wrote:
      | Yeah that's a good point, I should turn off the fans for a
      | day and see if it changes the power use...
 
    | teruakohatu wrote:
    | A sensor would be easy enough, there are simple non-smart
    | sensor fan timer that will activate a fan for a programable
    | time.
 
| Symbiote wrote:
| > [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/
 
  | kentonv wrote:
  | 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.
 
  | necovek wrote:
  | 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.
 
  | jillyboel wrote:
  | That's awesome! Unfortunately it's all "request a quote". Can
  | you shed some light on how much you paid?
 
    | Symbiote wrote:
    | 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".
 
| eertami wrote:
| 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.
 
  | kentonv wrote:
  | 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.
 
    | zexodus wrote:
    | > 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.
 
      | hk1337 wrote:
      | Or oils from your hand, perhaps?
 
    | buildsjets wrote:
    | 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...
 
| amatecha wrote:
| 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!
 
| hk1337 wrote:
| > 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?
 
  | kentonv wrote:
  | See: https://lanparty.house/#why-build-in
 
| syntaxing wrote:
| > 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?!
 
  | valzam wrote:
  | 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.
 
    | Tijdreiziger wrote:
    | At first, my jaw was open looking at the photos.
    | 
    | Then I remembered... oh yeah, everything is bigger in America
    | (especially in Texas)!
 
    | sevg wrote:
    | 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...
 
    | maccard wrote:
    | I live in what would be considered a large house in the UK
    | and it's marginally larger than that!
 
    | valzam wrote:
    | In fact, calling 1400 sq ft a bachelor pad and then
    | complaining about housing is unaffordable there is hilarious
    | on many levels.
 
    | Mistletoe wrote:
    | 3/4 of Americans are overweight or obese now. We need a lot
    | of room.
 
  | toast0 wrote:
  | 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.
 
| RulerOf wrote:
| > 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
 
  | kentonv wrote:
  | 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...
 
    | kridsdale3 wrote:
    | 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.
 
      | murderfs wrote:
      | 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
 
      | timc3 wrote:
      | 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.
 
    | toast0 wrote:
    | > 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.
 
      | vueko wrote:
      | +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.
 
        | toast0 wrote:
        | sfp+ is clearly cheaper, and less heat/power, but I've
        | got cat5e in the walls and between my house and detached
        | garage, so I've got to use 10g-baseT to get between the
        | garage and the house, and up to my office from the
        | basement. At my two network closet areas, I use sfp+ for
        | servers.
        | 
        | 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.
 
        | vueko wrote:
        | Oh true, good point, being wired for ethernet is another
        | valid usecase. I'm lucky in that my ONT is just a
        | commodity Nokia switch I can slap any sfp+ form factor
        | transceiver I want in the appropriate port of for the
        | connection to the router, so in my case 10gbe is truly
        | banishable to the devices I can't get a pcie card into.
        | I'm still in the phase of masking taping cables to the
        | ceiling instead of doing real wall pulls, but when I do
        | get around to that I feel like I'm going to pick up an
        | aliexpress fiber splicer and pull single-mode fiber to
        | futureproof it and make sure I never have to deal with
        | pulls again (and not be stuck on an old ethernet standard
        | in the magical future where I can get a 100gbit wan
        | link).
 
    | jmb99 wrote:
    | > 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.
 
    | tinco wrote:
    | 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.
 
    | murderfs wrote:
    | 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.
 
      | kentonv wrote:
      | 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).
 
    | justmarc wrote:
    | 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.
 
    | ThatPlayer wrote:
    | 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.
 
      | amluto wrote:
      | 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.
 
    | tarasglek wrote:
    | 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.
 
    | amluto wrote:
    | 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.
 
| Multiplayer wrote:
| 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.
 
  | leptons wrote:
  | Quake is still so much fun. Been playing for years with a group
  | and it doesn't get old.
 
    | ethbr1 wrote:
    | What changes after years of playing? I assume everyone has
    | every inch of the maps memorized?
 
      | leptons wrote:
      | >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.
 
        | system2 wrote:
        | Download it from tastyspleen.com and play online too. I
        | play quake2 online almost daily.
 
        | Ringz wrote:
        | Domain for sale?
 
        | pentagrama wrote:
        | I think it may be http://tastyspleen.net/
 
  | zamalek wrote:
  | 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.
 
    | hunter2_ wrote:
    | Windows will self-assign from 169.254/16 in the absence of a
    | DHCP server.
 
      | tossandthrow wrote:
      | Also 15 years ago?
 
        | Symbiote wrote:
        | Yes.
        | 
        | 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...
 
    | mattbee wrote:
    | 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!
 
    | animal531 wrote:
    | 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.
 
    | albertzeyer wrote:
    | 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.
 
      | Moru wrote:
      | Yes, you need terminators for them :-)
 
| xyst wrote:
| 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.
 
| deadbabe wrote:
| 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.
 
| iwontberude wrote:
| Such a cool house, too bad it's in Texas
 
| echoangle wrote:
| 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.
 
  | kentonv wrote:
  | 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.
 
    | TheAceOfHearts wrote:
    | 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.
 
      | ikrenji wrote:
      | he said they don't play competitive games.
 
      | kentonv wrote:
      | Hmm, I've never had an issue with this.
      | 
      | 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.)
 
      | Aeolun wrote:
      | Edit: I was wrong.
      | 
      | > 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).
 
      | michaelt wrote:
      | 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 :)
 
      | smolder wrote:
      | Yes, without an n-key rollover keyboard you run into
      | situations where perhaps running diagonally, plus reloading
      | or throwing a grenade won't register the last button press.
      | (E.g. Shift + W + D + R/G) It's kind of infuriating to run
      | into that problem on cheapo keyboards that have it.
 
  | ics wrote:
  | 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.
 
  | stevage wrote:
  | 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.
 
    | Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
    | 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.
 
      | stevage wrote:
      | True. Only 98% of mechanical keyboards are noisy.
 
        | smolder wrote:
        | Nope, not even close. Mainly just the ones with clicky
        | (e.g. mx-blue, less so mx-brown) switches. It's an option
        | but not a requirement, and honestly not that common for
        | gaming-oriented ones, which typically have linear non-
        | clicky switches, which can be quieter than membrane
        | buttons, even. I like the semi-clicky brown ones for
        | typing but haven't used them for years for noise reasons.
        | My mechanical KBs have generally always had rubber
        | o-rings that dampen the sound from bottoming out, too, a
        | fairly common feature.
        | 
        | Apparently, based on your earlier post, you bought the
        | noisy kind. That's on you.
 
  | fuzzy2 wrote:
  | 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.
 
| laidoffamazon wrote:
| 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.
 
  | crooked-v wrote:
  | 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.
 
    | cluckindan wrote:
    | 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.
 
      | qeternity wrote:
      | 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.
 
        | blitzar wrote:
        | The median family's wealth is 0.6 * {their primary
        | residence}.
 
      | crooked-v wrote:
      | > 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-...
 
    | voisin wrote:
    | > 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.
 
    | ClassyJacket wrote:
    | 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.
 
      | mschuster91 wrote:
      | 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.
 
        | OJFord wrote:
        | Not to say there's not restaurants/bars open just as late
        | or noisy, but fwiw I would say typically a _pub_ in the
        | UK would be the whole (vertical) building - rooms
        | upstairs for staff or B &B, if not more seating for pub
        | restaurant.
 
  | kristianp wrote:
  | What's a $NET shareholder?
 
    | laidoffamazon wrote:
    | A somewhat small subset of my net worth is Cloudflare, which
    | has the ticker symbol $NET
 
    | theideaofcoffee wrote:
    | 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!
 
      | GlacierFox wrote:
      | 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.
 
  | compiler-devel wrote:
  | When have increased taxes directly contributed to your take
  | home pay?
 
    | IAmGraydon wrote:
    | It doesn't. They're just expressing their jealousy in a
    | thinly veiled and highly embarrassing way.
 
      | laidoffamazon wrote:
      | It's not very thinly veiled
 
      | compiler-devel wrote:
      | It truly is embarrassing. Imagine seeing something and
      | thinking, "how can I get the government to forcefully take
      | some of that for my benefit?"
 
        | laidoffamazon wrote:
        | It's not for my benefit, I just want to see Stanford
        | grads get punished. I could get more punitive but I keep
        | that for yelling at strangers in person.
 
        | kentonv wrote:
        | Where did the Stanford thing come from? I went to the
        | University of Minnesota.
 
        | trelane wrote:
        | Any chance you have a gopher server running there then?
 
        | alchemist1e9 wrote:
        | Absolutely embarrassing and a real life demonstration of
        | a famous quote:
        | 
        | "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."
 
        | stemlord wrote:
        | To be fair OP's website explains that most of the money
        | isn't earned income. I'm happy for them though
 
    | lostlogin wrote:
    | 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?
 
      | compiler-devel wrote:
      | Yes you have missed something but don't worry about it.
 
    | wiredfool wrote:
    | When health insurance is 10x cheaper because of it.
 
  | IAmGraydon wrote:
  | 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?
 
    | laidoffamazon wrote:
    | I spend about $3.2k a month for a studio apartment in an HCOL
    | area. I don't even own a car.
 
      | bigstrat2003 wrote:
      | 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.
 
        | 47282847 wrote:
        | What's this fixation on house ownership? It doesn't make
        | sense rationally. Stock markets always perform better,
        | easily beating ownership and the hassle and associated
        | risks of managing property.
 
        | fragmede wrote:
        | Because you can build things like the house we're
        | commenting on. If that's not your thing that's totally
        | fine, but sometimes people want to spend way their hard
        | earned money on adapting their living situation to suit
        | their desires.
        | 
        | 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.
 
        | mikem170 wrote:
        | One factor: It's an investment that you can get for 20%
        | down, or less. You can't borrow that much to gamble in
        | the stock market. All is well as long as the value of the
        | house doesn't go down.
        | 
        | 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.
 
        | kasey_junk wrote:
        | And the loan is heavily subsidized by the federal
        | government (and frequently by other governments as well).
        | 
        | 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.
 
        | kelnos wrote:
        | Some people value other things than homeownership.
        | 
        | Some people value living in their area (regardless of
        | what it costs) for reasons that make moving undesirable.
 
      | jmb99 wrote:
      | 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.
 
      | that_guy_iain wrote:
      | It sounds more like you can afford to buy a house, just not
      | in the area you want.
 
  | tptacek wrote:
  | 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.)
 
    | laidoffamazon wrote:
    | I want both too, but neither is going to happen in the next
    | 4-12 years so I can only fantasize about punitive measures
 
  | 0xDEAFBEAD wrote:
  | Your net worth is far above the median. If taxes increase, you
  | are likely to lose wealth, not gain it.
 
    | segfaltnh wrote:
    | 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...
 
  | sfeng wrote:
  | 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'.
 
    | laidoffamazon wrote:
    | 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.
 
      | alecco wrote:
      | 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.
 
      | newsclues wrote:
      | "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?
 
| frakkingcylons wrote:
| 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.
 
| valzam wrote:
| > I miss the old MX518.
| 
| Truely the peak of mouse design.
 
  | eajr wrote:
  | 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.
 
    | kentonv wrote:
    | The new one is a lot more expensive but I might get it.
 
    | throwaway888889 wrote:
    | For me it is the MS intellimouse
 
      | kentonv wrote:
      | Oh man that was a good one too.
 
        | throwaway888889 wrote:
        | They started making it again a few years back. Then
        | discontinued... But you still might be able to find one
        | :)
 
| Sakos wrote:
| 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.
 
| yapyap wrote:
| House, or room?
 
| djhworld wrote:
| 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
 
  | kentonv wrote:
  | 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.
 
| wdr1 wrote:
| 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.
 
  | throwaway888889 wrote:
  | 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
 
    | smolder wrote:
    | The worst Linus... the one who pretends to understand
    | computers on youtube for a living.
 
| chipweinberger wrote:
| my favorite part is the cat walk with the doors to the rooms, how
| cool! treehouse vibes.
 
| stringtoint wrote:
| Where is the guy duck taped to the ceiling?
 
| written-beyond wrote:
| 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.
 
| ata_aman wrote:
| Beautiful. All of it. I love it when tech brings people together.
 
| marxisttemp wrote:
| Nice, can you guys help me with a down payment? I don't need
| dozens of 4070s, just four walls and a roof
 
  | ARandomerDude wrote:
  | I found your problem right here:
  | 
  | > marxisttemp
  | 
  | Get a job and quit blowing all your money on alcohol, and
  | you'll be amazed at how quickly you can get four walls and a
  | roof. I had that when I was still flipping burgers for a
  | living.
 
| mcdeltat wrote:
| 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...
 
  | hehehheh wrote:
  | Flipside: they created more housing, in a place where people
  | want it. He even said prices in Austin are falling because of
  | development.
 
| latentcall wrote:
| 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!
 
  | nivethan wrote:
  | > I wouldn't feel right with myself if I didn't say something.
  | 
  | Many people live with not feeling right with themselves.
 
  | redman25 wrote:
  | 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.
 
| r1ch wrote:
| 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?
 
  | kentonv wrote:
  | 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).
 
  | slumberlust wrote:
  | Not OP, but he website addresses this:
  | https://lanparty.house/#cable-latency
 
    | r1ch wrote:
    | Thanks, somehow I missed that entry.
 
| asn007 wrote:
| 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
 
  | kentonv wrote:
  | 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.
 
    | asn007 wrote:
    | 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 :)
 
    | Moru wrote:
    | 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.
 
| mclightning wrote:
| how do I join? :D are you guys hiring at cloudflare per chance?
 
| findyourexit wrote:
| 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!
 
| jillyboel wrote:
| Must be nice to be stinking rich
 
  | system2 wrote:
  | 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.
 
| solardev wrote:
| 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.
 
| zipmapfoldright wrote:
| Sweet setup! I'm curious if you use the machines for anything
| when it isn't being used for a LAN party.
 
  | kentonv wrote:
  | 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.
 
| johnohara wrote:
| 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.
 
| LakesAndTrees wrote:
| 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.
 
  | MetaMalone wrote:
  | So real. Most valuable component of this setup
 
    | wyclif wrote:
    | 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.
 
      | Aeolun wrote:
      | I do, but the group is nowhere near large enough (3-4
      | people) that we need a house dedicated to it...
 
  | ckmiller wrote:
  | Especially amazing considering that he moved from Palo Alto to
  | Austin. Did all his friends move too?
 
    | kentonv wrote:
    | 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.)
 
    | jokethrowaway wrote:
    | 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.
 
      | hawk_ wrote:
      | 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?
 
| XCSme wrote:
| 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.
 
  | XCSme wrote:
  | 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.
 
  | kentonv wrote:
  | 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.
 
    | digitaltensor wrote:
    | 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.
 
| brink wrote:
| Nice work mate. I hope it all makes you happy!
 
| luispa wrote:
| cat
 
| aeturnum wrote:
| 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.
 
  | kentonv wrote:
  | I thought that too originally! This is covered in the Q&A:
  | 
  | https://lanparty.house/#why-build-in
 
| 9x39 wrote:
| 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?
 
  | kentonv wrote:
  | 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.
 
    | LelouBil wrote:
    | 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 ?
 
      | kentonv wrote:
      | Why not do it live? It works!
      | 
      | 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.
 
    | 9x39 wrote:
    | 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.
 
      | kentonv wrote:
      | I guess you're suggesting I leave the machines on and hope
      | they all update themselves in the background.
      | 
      | 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.
 
| michaelhoney wrote:
| I salute your commitment to fun and friends, this is awesome.
 
| hokumguru wrote:
| 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.
 
  | kentonv wrote:
  | Monoprice SlimRun cables -- they have USB, DisplayPort, and
  | HDMI. They transmit over fiber optic and seem to work just fine
  | even at 100ft.
 
| babyent wrote:
| Awesome build. I also really enjoyed reading about you. Wish you
| both all the best :)
| 
| Cheers, to many GGs at the LAN parties.
 
| calvinmorrison wrote:
| 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.
 
| viiralvx wrote:
| Not gonna lie, this is really dope! Can I be your friend and
| drive from Houston for a LAN Party?
 
  | voisin wrote:
  | 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!
 
| Daub wrote:
| Looking at this I was making noises like Homer Simpson looking at
| donuts.
 
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| 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.
 
  | kentonv wrote:
  | > 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.
 
| sriram_malhar wrote:
| 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.
 
  | kentonv wrote:
  | 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.
 
    | hunter2_ wrote:
    | 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).
 
| esafak wrote:
| > 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?!
 
| bschwindHN wrote:
| 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.
 
| ikt wrote:
| Only thing I'm surprised about is the intel+nvidia combo not an
| AMD/AMD or AMD+Nvidia combo
 
| 0xDEAFBEAD wrote:
| 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...
 
| Animats wrote:
| A PC bang in your house?[1] Why not?
| 
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC_bang
 
| frazar0 wrote:
| > RGB: None
| 
| I chuckled.
 
| grose wrote:
| 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.
 
| hehehheh wrote:
| 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!
 
| kitsune_ wrote:
| It's a tangent but I think two white collar workers being able to
| afford this and having this lifestyle is why Trump won.
 
| vuckov wrote:
| 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.
 
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > 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.
 
| lucasfcosta wrote:
| 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.
 
| cannibalXxx wrote:
| i really enjoy seeing and reading content like this. the way the
| process is developed and worked on by the team
 
| heraldgeezer wrote:
| 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.
 
| heraldgeezer wrote:
| Invite LinusTechTips now!!!
 
| heraldgeezer wrote:
| Damn... I read those profiles and I feel sick. I wasted my life
| on reddit, youtube and forums.
 
| pistoleer wrote:
| 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...
 
| keb_ wrote:
| damn if I had this kinda money I'd do something crazy. like pay
| off my parent's mortgage.
 
| appel wrote:
| 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.
 
| Farbklex wrote:
| 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 Cafe
| 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.
 
| v3ss0n wrote:
| 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.
 
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