9. Closing Thoughts

Even though I covered power in Part 1, there are a few things to keep in mind for powering your networking gear. While running power for your event, you should strongly consider running all of your networking equipment from dedicated power circuits.

Connecting floor switches to table power circuits provide all-too-vulnerable potential points of failure. Network switches generally take very little power, so you can run eight or so of them (at 2 amps each) off the same circuit. Go ahead and do it, it'll save you lots of grief when / if power problems crop up! Note that depending on the size of your LAN Party, you may need more than one circuit to handle all your floor switches.

If you have just one or two server machines, you should be ok powering the servers and switches off the same circuit. But if your server row looks more like the one in Figure 10, you might also consider a separate circuit for your core and server row switch power!

Figure 10: Now THAT's a server row!

So by now you know how to plan a LAN party, power it and install a LAN that will provide trouble-free gaming. In the next part of this series, I'll show you how to proactively monitor and manage the live LAN and troubleshoot the problems that inevitably appear.

Christopher (AlexKidd) Dickens and his partner Dave Wilson own and operate LANrental.com, a LAN rental business serving the Kentucky, Indiana, Ohio, Southern Illinois, Eastern Missouri, Northern Alabama and Northern Georgia area.