Network topology dilemma

I come to you guys, because I know there is no other place I would get the kind of advise I need.


Since the year 2000 I've been doing with some friends LAN parties in Venezuela, nothing too fancy just 80 guys 3 days straight of pure gaming, this past weekend my friends did the LAN Party ( I was not able to participate since I no longer live in Venezuela) its is called Land Of Lans it was the 8th one and we failed with the networking.

For the gaming part we are running perfectly fine, but people loves to share their data in the event, we have some guys with hundreds of gigs in pron :rolleyes: other with the same amount in videos, old games, music, photos. When people start to pull the data is when mayhem happens the network goes to a crawl and I don't know what to do.

we have 3 netgear giga switchs the smart ones that you can somewhat manage and 2 tp link also giga but these ones are not manageable, we run them in a 5 star topology with one switch of 8 port giga managing the 5 stars.

Other important thing is we have some gold mines in the network, two or three guys that have all the data everyone is looking for and most of the time we have all people trying to pull data from them which is a problem.

so after all that my question is what can I do to improve the speed of the network without going crazy in the shopping department, we don't make any money from these events all our assests are from our own money.

thanks in advance

if they are manageable and your "gold mines" can support it you could team adapters and switches.
basically you could have 2 or more cables go from the switch to the next to double the bandwidth. in theory anyway.
your bottleneck is going to be the 8 port switch if it does not support it or does not have any ports available

I'd suggest you make some choices when you set up. You could, for example set up more than one network with separate hardware and network masks and set those "gold mine" peeps to be on both (requires two nics on their machine which isn't uncommon these days). Then the file sharing can be on the smaller second network and the gaming on the other one. Going all "legal" and banning the file sharing probably won't be popular with that crowd but you need to get that off the gaming network. If you could convince them to put anything they're willing to share on external HHDs and connect them to a non-gaming machine (ie make it a file server) it would also give those guys a fair chance to play.
You could also make sure that the machines with the highest expected traffic are on the fastest network hardware and have multiple connections to it (multiple nics again). If you're running DHCP on this network make VERY sure the DHCP server hardware is on the fastest part of the network, not off at the far end somewhere.

we are running static IP

we tried the file server thing and it is almost impossible to do and if I go 100% legal they would kill me for sure hahahahaha

so in the first idea you are telling me I can have my friends pc he has two nics one of the nics in the major network just for gaming and the other nic in a smaller network for file sharing, how do we manage what goes to each nic ?

Wouldn't running some type of QoS help in this case too?

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Originally Posted by [XC] leviathan18

we are running static IP
<snip>
so in the first idea you are telling me I can have my friends pc he has two nics one of the nics in the major network just for gaming and the other nic in a smaller network for file sharing, how do we manage what goes to each nic ?

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Since you're running static you'd set up each network with substantially different IP ranges for a start (say 192.168.1.x for games and 10.0.0.x for file sharing). If would also require some voluntary compliance from your gamers so they don't try and download files and game on the same network anyway, but this might help: http://www.r1ch.net/stuff/forcebindip/
If the shared files are only shared on the right network, and those sharing the files will help you do this, then it should defuse the selfish SOBs pulling files down over the game network.

my gold mines are compliant so this wont be a problem, i have to check the switches to see if I can create a sub network with them so we can run in parallel two networks with the same equipment

I'd suggest physically splitting it as well as logically. Blue cable to the larger main network, red cable to a different switch and the smaller file sharing network. I can't guarantee how your hardware will react to running two different subnets on the same physical topology (without a router in between), but I'd suspect it will not like it.

Put the gaming network on a separate IP range than the File Sharing network.

Gaming: 10.0.0.0/255.255.255.0

File Sharing: 192.168.0.0/255.255.255.0

Don't set a default gateway on the one with no internet connection [File Sharing hopefully].

we dont have internet xD just local lan

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Originally Posted by retro77

Put the gaming network on a separate IP range than the File Sharing network.

Gaming: 10.0.0.0/255.255.255.0

File Sharing: 192.168.0.0/255.255.255.0

Don't set a default gateway on the one with no internet connection [File Sharing hopefully].

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If you do that without physically separating the networks all you'll do is prevent one logical network from seeing the other. The hardware will actually have to cope with more traffic this way (twice the network management overhead) and end up being just as (if not more) congested. It also assumes the control software in the switches can cope with more than one connected subnet, which is normally the job of a router.

Think of this like building a cluster. You need two separate networks, one for gaming (command and control) and one for file sharing (data transfer). In this case not every machine needs to be connected to both networks at the same time but each kind of traffic needs to be confined to it's own network, logically (IP addresses) and physically (cables and switch). Another possibility might be to add a wireless access point (or two) to free up some of the switch ports and cables.

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Originally Posted by D_A

If you do that without physically separating the networks all you'll do is prevent one logical network from seeing the other. The hardware will actually have to cope with more traffic this way (twice the network management overhead) and end up being just as (if not more) congested. It also assumes the control software in the switches can cope with more than one connected subnet, which is normally the job of a router.

Think of this like building a cluster. You need two separate networks, one for gaming (command and control) and one for file sharing (data transfer). In this case not every machine needs to be connected to both networks at the same time but each kind of traffic needs to be confined to it's own network, logically (IP addresses) and physically (cables and switch). Another possibility might be to add a wireless access point (or two) to free up some of the switch ports and cables.

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That was in addition to your guys comments to physically separate them. I've got about 15 years of network experience. I could draw up a Visio if you guys want :D

Also it doesn't add any additional network overhead having two IP ranges on the same network. The switch builds an ARP table and it doesn't matter what the IPs are, it's still going to have one entry for each MAC address matching to an IP address.

If the OP would comment back with a status update, we could help further. I like networking and I like helping :up:

well as I said I'm living now in Panama I'm passing the comments to the guys and they are going to test it to see what we can do, we also have 500$ to spend on some equipment and we are looking what should we buy.

We are contemplating a file server a smaller network for file sharing and trying to determine what are the capabilities of our switches

teaming .. Link Aggregation
increase the bandwidth capability and feed everybody with what they want

For those 500 Dollars you should be able to buy sufficient switching hardware (consumer grade atleast) to have 2 physically separated networks.
Have the best network handle gaming and the other network handle file sharing.

Theoretically pc's should be able to handle this no problem.
Just use the 192.168.x.x for one network and 10.x.x.x for the other.

Here's another idea; why not use torrents and local peer discovery? You can have a central switch (with DHCP service and the seeders) connected to auxiliary switches (with leeches/peers). Make a few torrents for each directory and let people share. That should reduce the strain on the network. You can also use QoS and packet dropping to ensure that game connections are treated as higher priority than torrent connections. The system can be very fast if the seeds use super-seeding.

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Originally Posted by Bobsama

Here's another idea; why not use torrents and local peer discovery? You can have a central switch (with DHCP service and the seeders) connected to auxiliary switches (with leeches/peers). Make a few torrents for each directory and let people share. That should reduce the strain on the network. You can also use QoS and packet dropping to ensure that game connections are treated as higher priority than torrent connections. The system can be very fast if the seeds use super-seeding.

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this is actually a very cost effective way to solve the issue and with QoS we ensure the gaming part fo the network has the priority