Are you the one who was upset about D&D at the last monthly lan?

Very. because I saw your post on a different forum telling folks that they didnt miss out on anything and that somehow, some way D&D took over the lan and caused you to have a bad time. I can take a joke but I wasn't thrilled to see that post on the other forum.

If this is normal at a monthly LAN, then i will surely tell people that. .  And I for one will not attend monthly LAN's.  The yearly 200 man LAN though I highly recommend.

I was not out of line posting what I did.  I was the creator of that thread on that forum ENDORSING the lan initially. I have already endorsed the 200 man LAN on that same forum, which I believe the dates were announced AFTER the summer LAN.  I will probably make another thread about it when the time comes.


Not every review can be positive. I apologize if I offended.

pfsense has exceptional QoS settings to limit the amount of resources being used by individuals.   Torrenting could pretty much be shutdown by doing this and BC2/SC2 traffic could be given higher priority.  This is very similar to what organizations do for VoIP traffic.

Newly purchased Steam games could have backup files hosted on the LAN somewhere.  I know I will definitely be backing up any steam game I have for easy distribution once on site. Same with patches.  As for WoW, those people should be shot (j/k)

I do hope that others chime in for some server suggestions that I may be able to provide.

The problem isn't so much the configuration. Sully has taken great care of the configuration of our pfsense boxes. Torrent's and WoW have been blocked except I believe the WoW rule is time based so those that need their fix can get it during downtime. The problem is we can't guarantee internet service. It would be a bad decision on our part to decide to hold a tournament for a game when we can't control the connection to it. We get enough grief from people who don't agree with our server configs. But if you find a BC2 server that you connect well to from the LAN there is a section to add servers to the public listing. Granted I don't have or have not built the modules to get the game data from those servers. I guess that will get put on the never ending list.

As for D&D at the July LAN.. It was discussed in great detail before the LAN.
http://www.fites.net/general-discussion/dd-at-the-summer-lan/
We didn't mean for it to be as disruptive as it did, but it was meant for a bit of diversion. Some of us don't see each other except for at LAN parties and we wanted a little bit of a change up. Hell it should have only been 6 of the 30 of us playing that.

As for Czar's unhappiness with the post on another forum I can also say I wasn't thrilled, but you are entitled to your opinion. But I think I can speak for FITES as a whole by saying that we would rather have you come tell us to our face. I can understand your dissatisfaction with what happened, but if we don't know we can't take steps to improve upon things. We try our best to let everyone have a good time. That is the reason why the large events have trophies for winners of tournaments and prizes are issued more at random. I would say that we have one of the most diverse groups attending our events. Ages from young to old. Father daughter and mother son teams; whole families come to our large events. Our monthlies (We call them that even though they are usually 6 weeks or so apart.) are more laid back for the staff and the regulars. I just want you to have an idea of where we are coming from.

FITES is unique. We're old. I believe the average age of a FITES staff member is like 26 or something. Regardless of the age, FITES members (both staff and non-staff) have formed friendships outside of just lan events. Cookouts at each other's homes, movie nights to catch midnight releases, dinner outings now and again. You can find us each and every weekend night on Teamspeak playing games, chatting, or making fun of Tibs. We're a family of sorts. Met each other's wives/kids, chat during work, all that.  That's why we took the comment seriously. I see where you're coming from now and understand. No hard feelings on my end.

I don't plan on their being any other D&D sessions at lans, due to the formation of my own monthly group, the preparation for that is enough. If I find people new to D&D that want to try, I`ll be happy to run a session in a different part of the building away from the main lan. We have plenty of space here.

Back to the original topic....we've been running pfSense (and m0n0wall before that) since 2006 IIRC. The hardware that we run it on isn't anything fantastic, but it's always been more than sufficient. We've never even come close to maxing out the state table or even hitting the 50% mark for RAM. I wish the CPU was a bit faster to better handle some of the QoS I do, but it's adequate.

What you can see from the attached is from our last 200 LAN. That's a 5-minute average over the two days of the LAN. Most of the time we were saturating a 50mb pipe from people downloading games from Steam that they either purchased while at the LAN or had previously purchased but didn't bother installing until they got to the LAN. There were also two very large (900+ MB) patches that everyone was grabbing for UT3. It seemed by the time we could get a copy of the files ourselves to post onto a local file server everyone had what they needed.

We'd used a local file server in the past for things like patches and drivers (when our internet connection was the craptastic 768kbps that the hotel provided), but according to the logs it was barely touched. A couple years ago, I decided I wasn't going to do the patch server any more because it was a lot of work to get all the files that everyone might possibly need onto the server for not a whole lot of benefit.

Next year we will have a 100mb connection thanks to our friends at Comcast, but even so, I think we'll be returning to the use of a patch server just to have our bases covered. Even so, I wouldn't want to pin our hopes on having a successful BC2 tourney as we all know it's not the speed of your internet connection that matters, it's the latency. We can provide a gigabit connection to the internet and won't matter if we're getting pings of 100ms to the server hosting the game.

I've been out of the loop for the past couple of months with personal commitments so I don't know what the plans are for BC2, but you can guarantee if it's only half-assed, we won't do it. FITES has always strived to be the best and that's why your direct feedback to the staff is always very important so we can better understand the climate of the gamers at the LAN. If we're not doing something right, tell us about it. If one person says something, they're probably just a whiny bitch and can be forgotten about. But if we have multiple people telling us about the same thing, you can be damn sure we'll listen and try to improve.