CherryPopper

One of the main assumptions about running a LAN event no matter how small is there really isn't that much to it. While this maybe true for your little house LAN where all you need is room enough for 5-10 people, tables & chairs, a switch & some cables and a few power boards with pizza huts number on speed dial for one awesome weekend its a whole different beast running a MonsterLAN.

I've already covered how I got into running MonsterLAN in a previous post. So following on from that this will be part 1 of a 3 part walk through of what goes on behind the scenes of MonsterLAN. Part 1 will cover what we do before the doors open, part 2 will cover the running of the event and part 3 will be the aftermath of the event.

Before the doors open

There are a lot of things to organise before even one gamer steps into the venue, a lot more than even I first thought of when I ran my first event. I mean who would have thought you would be checking the toilets to make sure they had enough toilet paper when you running a Gaming LAN event?

The first thing that happens is the admins pick a date for the event. While even this may seem easy, finding a date that works for all the admins & making sure the venue isn't booked can be very painful. We try to book 12 months in advance as the venue does get booked quite early sometimes.

Once the date & venue are sorted the admins start chatting about what we would like to do for the next event. This is where some of our more deranged and possibly dangerous crazy ideas have come from. Some of the more memorable ones are the infamous Search for a Smacktard, Lupin's Loons and everyone's favourite Dodgeball where born.

Then comes some of the boring stuff like ensuring VicLAN have enough PLI (Public Liability Insurance) for the number of gamers we are aiming for and the VicLAN equipment is available on the date of our event. We need PLI because if someone trips and hurts themselves and they sue us we don't lose our shirts because of them. We run the events for fun and really don't want us to cost us everything, plus most large venues wont let you run a public event without $1,000,000 in PLI... yes folks 1 million dollars!!!

With the all the major stuff out the way we now start to advertise the event on the website. Now for those who have been with us from the start will know our little website has seen a lot of change since the early days. MonsterLAN.com grew from just a small site where no one posts in the forums but me to the massive 5 posts per day it is now!!! We also made it easier to register for events and put up more information about the events for newbies.

Now it comes time to start to hit up the sponsors for freebies. Which I'm sure you all think is the easy part, just shoot of an email to all the major companies like Nvidia, Intel, AMD and watch the thousands of dollars worth of prizes roll in.... ok so maybe not. Most sponsors are a pain in the ass, they give you fuck all and expect the world in return. We've had a certain sponsor, *cough* katech *cough* wanting to only allow food & drink in the venue if it was sold by them! In return they offered $500 worth of prizes. Needless to say we quickly told them where to put their prizes.

Good sponsors are hard to find but luckily we have a good reputation in the Gaming LAN community and some good sponsors found us when I had given up hope. They only ask for a few basic things like a sponsor banner on the website, banners/posters hung up at the events and pictures taken of both the event & the prizes been given away. In return they give us some pretty awesome swag sometimes. THQ are quite good when they have games coming out and will load us up with lots of goodies including collectors editions of new games and other goodies. Thermaltake are also great in sending us a box full of stuff that cools, glows and purifies the air!! They also love to send us a case for our larger events. Without this type of sponsorship support the prize pool for MonsterLAN wouldn't be as kick ass as it is, big thanks for THQ & Thermaltake.

After the tournament survey has been completed its now time for the most important part of the pre-event setup, servers. Without these puppies running like a well tuned engine your LAN will die quicker than if it had the blaster worm. At MonsterLAN we use an all in one Uber Linux Server that basically controls the LAN event and then 2-6 dedicated Windows game servers. Each one of these game servers can run 1-4 game servers at a time depending on how many players & what game it is. This allows us to run as many servers as there are matches (i.e: 10 teams = 5 matches = 5 servers) so we get the tournament finished in a decent time frame.

There is a lot of testing that goes into the game servers before the event, this is one of the most time consuming things I do before an event. We make things as simple as possible to run on the day so we can get things running quickly. Pre-configuring maps, game settings and round times ensures things run smoothly on the day. Rogue has developed a bunch of scripts that make starting a game server easy so our monkey admins Boxy & Holmsy can even start a server! We also use any tournament mods for the games we run to make running the tournament as easy as possible for us & the gamers. For those that are interested in setting up your own game servers can check out our MonsterLAN Wiki for more info.

The Uber Linux Server was quite a bit of work to get where it is today. Initially it was just a web server for us to use to host game patches but it has since grown into being the most important server at MonsterLAN. It does the following:

• Tunez - MP3 Jukebox
• Squid Proxy Server - Internet Sharing/Limiting
• DNS Server
• LAN Nazi DHCP Server Allows only paid gamers on the network
• MRTG Monitoring of switches, Internet and Servers
• Internet Gateway/Firewall
• Teamspeak Server
• Ventrilo Server

• Web Server ML Intranet site

Which includes:

• Tournaments Administration and Registration
• Patches and other files
• Game Server List
• TeamSpeak Channels
• General Event Details
• and more...

Finally it comes time to actually rock up to the venue and start to setup. The fun part about the venue is they play hide & seek with their tables. We use every table they have for the large events and hunting around the venue finding them is just soooooo much fun, because I really have nothing better to do. Laying carpet, lugging tables and chairs is also not what I started running events for but its a necessary evil that must be done. Once the heavy work is done then its time to lay power & the lifeline of the LAN event... the network. MonsterLAN is setup in a star network topology (every switch has 1 uplink to a backbone). Each uplink to the backbone is 1gbit and the ports gamers plug into are 100mbit. This is more than enough for gaming & the leechers can go leech somewhere else. That being said we haven't yet hit the maximum throughput of the switches or uplinks & I know this due to me setting up monitoring, so don't blame the network

Once its all setup, tested and the event is ready to rock the admins finally have some down time to get ready for the onslaught of gamers that are just waiting to stop playing with themselves and enjoy another MonsterLAN event.

Part 2 will be on running the event and everything that goes with it. Stay tuned.