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I ran the annual KROSTech 30 hour LAN last weekend. While we have a fair amount of gear that was purchased specifically for the LAN we needed to take some of our home network installation as we had decided to host the the Bathurst spectacular (6 hours of racing) on a Gigabit Network for better performance.

In order to work out how to strip components from home and set up the LAN properly as well as leaving the family with network and intenet connections I used Visio to create my network diagrams. It took me 45 minutes to set this up.
Click the image thumbnails below to see the fullsize network diagrams.

Home network before reorganising. There is redundancy built into this network. What you can see from the diagram is the physical layout of the house and that has made decisions about where switches and the wireless router are located. Most switches can be instantly replaced in case of failure. The tablet is in the media room running Windows Media Centre. It is connected wirelessly and also through a 100Mb wired connection. Gives us portability and stability of connection. The other laptop roams the houe as needed - eg to play games in the dining area or to use as a workstation for extra staff on occasion.

Home network after reorganising. We made the decision to remove Mercedes computer from the network for the 2 days. She is only 3 and doesn't need server access, and has plenty of games she can play on her computer that are not on the internet. This freed up the gigabit switches we needed for the LAN. Likewise the colour laser locally connected on Jude's computer is sufficient for her printing needs while the other one was physically disconnected from the network. Wirless access wasn't needed with both laptops going to the LAN.

LAN Network. the most important consideration here was getting the gigabit network we needed for the Bathurst Spectacular event. This required up to 12 PCS to be connected on a separate network that was stable and high speed for 6 hours of continuous game play. As it turned out we only needed 9 of the 11 available ports. the 100MB network was not used much as most people connected to the gigabit network, however it ran the internet backbone and was availble for those people who didnt have gigabit cards in their machines. the wireless router we used was with a differnt one to the home one so we didn't need to reset that or change the security on it. we ran unsecured for the LAN event as there was little chance of any neighbours snooping on it. The LAN is run at our church hall.

Other notes: the whole thing ran very smoothly at both ends. after the initial set up which was pretty painless the whole thing ran very smoothly. The only thing we did different to the diagram was to use the wireless router to provide DHCP so we didn't need the Linux DHCP serve, but we had it as a backup in case.