If you ever want to test your network admin skills I suggest hosting a semi-large LAN party where people bring their own computers. I used to help out at MPCon though work has interfered with the last couple.

You would think a bunch of people that build their own PC's and have high end equipment would be rather problem free but that is far from the case. Some common problems are:

  • Internet Sharing enabled: People pull IPs from someone instead of the DHCP server
  • Spyware: They have dual processors and both are dedicated to running the 1,000 instances of programs
  • Bad Parts: People manage to show up with video cards, hard drives and other important things non-working. Or they stop working as soon as they get there.

I'm pretty sure Best Buy and Comp USA see a large spike whenever an event is held to account for things people forgot or broke.

Some of the things we've done to combat these problems is to have ethernet cables at the ready, plenty of power, dynamic DNS entries, traffic shaping, firewalls on the external connectivity (shut out ports) and decent switches. Each time is definitely a learning experience though.

Of course you always get someone that unplugs something important like a switch so they can plug in their cell phone or some other device. Regardless it's a fun event to go too though I go mostly for the people and dining (not much of a gamer). Look forward to the next one which should be sometime in January hopefully.