6. Closing Thoughts

Security is very important when it comes to the management of any network, but a LAN Party is the "Wild Wild West" of networks. Many different types of hardware and OSes and just as wide a range of personalities that own them will be attending your event. Not everyone has the best intentions when they start scanning IP addresses on your LAN for open SNMP Management Agents or attempt to exploit vulnerabilities on critical servers.

Since it's impractical to set up a dedicated management network on a LAN Party budget, you should state a zero tolerance policy on network hacking in your sign-up / liability release forms and then enforce it!

In the next article, I will explain what you can do to detect the above flavors of hacking activities by utilizing a SYSLOG daemon on a UNIX or Windows host . For now, however, be sure to turn off any management features on your switches that you don't need, like writeable, private SNMP Agents. Also make sure to monitor event logs on your servers to look for unusual activity.

In this installment, I've covered what you need to know to build the network itself - from selecting the hardware and setting it up, to troubleshooting problems that you might encounter during a typical event. If you've never set up a party-sized network before, hopefully you now have a better understanding of the responsibilities of those who host large LAN parties.

In the fourth and final part of this series, I'll be covering the core network services for a LAN party. I'll show you how to set up a basic DHCP server as well as an advanced DHCP configuration ideally suited to running larger parties. I'll also cover setting up an Internet firewall that keeps packets flowing smoothly while allowing users of Steam-based games to update and access online play.

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.