LAN deployment

Overview
At it's simplest, LAN is two computers hooked together with a cross-over cable. However, as we want to build bigger LANs to accomodate more players, the requirements change and it's often pertinent to make good design choices to avoid degrading the gaming experience.

Network hardware
For few computers almost any kind of network is fine. Switches, hubs, WLAN all work. When you start going over 20 computers, the network connections start to become bottlenecks for the gaming.

Basis of LAN gaming is an Ethernet switch. They come at a variety of models and sizes to fit every taste.

In small-scale LANs, unmanaged switches are the best option that "just works". A good rule of thumb though is to buy the switch fanless with metal case. Also it's worth check from the specs whether the backplane of the switch is actually capable of transferring full traffic. Cheap switches may fail under high load.

Switches come in port numbers around 4, 8, 16, 24 and 48. Usually the price radically increases when going over 16 ports. Also, 24 and 48 port switches often have noisy fans. High-end switches also often feature additional faster ports (10/100 switch with 2 gigabit ports) for use with uplinks.

Wireless LAN (WLAN) is a cable-free option for small-scale LAN gaming. WLAN technologies have a variety of standards. A good rule of thumb is the get the latest standard equipment. Ignore the marketting standards that are vendor-dependent. Current standards are 802.11g and 802.11n (still at draft stage at the time of writing this). WLAN base stations are usually backwards compatible and support clients with equipment of a different (supported) standard. This however can cause the network performance to fallback to the level of the lowest accessing client. Most WLAN base stations can act as bridges to regular Ethernet networks. (Write here more about the overlapping frequencies, capacity and topology considerations!)

Network topology
Ideally for the network, all the hosts should be covered with a single switch. If that is not possible, switches should be linked together with fast backbone network.

The idea would be to optimize either: host-to-host connections (for peer-to-peer style traffic) and/or host-to-server connections (for the game servers).

If there is enough hardware, fail-over redundancy can also be sought with spanning tree and redundant links. This however is an advanced feature and requires managed switches and some experience to set up. Don't try to do this without consideration. It's easy to cause a loop in the segment that creates infinite amount of traffic that will drown everything until the loop is resolved.

Cabling
Common LAN cabling consists of twisted pair cabling with 8P8C (or RJ-45) connectors. The name is "too technical" for the common people, so you can find it under a variety of technically incorrect names in the retail stores and speech. They're usually called a "RJ-45 cable" since the connector is the most distinguishing feature.

Twisted pair cabling quality is ranked with so-called categories. Categories run from 1 to 6 (at the time of this writing, CAT-7 is still informal) and the most suitable categories are from 5 to 6. Category 5 (CAT-5) cabling is capable of transferring 100Base-TX ethernet, while Category 5e (CAT-5e) or Category 6 (CAT-6) is capable of transferring 1000Base-T.

Since setting up the LAN is a physical exercise itself broken cables are easily spotted and removed. It's still worth a while to buy quality cables. This doesn't mean brand cables (like MonsterCable), but rather getting the required category (pref. CAT5e/6). Also preferably get cables with molded connectors. Molded connectors are more stress resilient.

Twisted pair cabling can also be self-made. All you need is a spool of cable, connectors and a crimping tool. Crimped connectors won't have the resiliency of store bought molded connectors, but when making the cables yourself at least the cable lengths are just what you wanted. Also worth to notice, self-made cables are made from single-threaded cables meant for static installations. Store-bought patch cables normally use multi-threaded cable that is more flexible.

(Get some pictures here!)

Fiber cabling..

Network services
Common needs for LAN network services include:
 * DHCP service, possibly including network boot services
 * Internet gateway, including tunneling and firewalling
 * File services
 * Dedicated game servers

Troubleshooting

 * Tools, ping, traceroute
 * Network hazards
 * Hardware in general
 * Software in general

Other equipment

 * Wireless doorbell..