Burning time on route to Houston

[evulish]

Originally posted by Neal Turett
I've been admining LANs (10+ people) for a while. Even a small LAN wouldn't work on the plane.

First, you can't use WiFi. I have no interest in landing in the Gulf.

Two, wires get really messy. You put them in the aisles, the drink cart rips out everyone's network ports at once.

Three, hubs generally require AC power. Without a hub, you're limitted to two people.

Four, you can't have a quiet LAN. The pilot couldn't hear the tower over us.

The list goes on.... this assumes that you get the network running in the first place. I've been doing LAN Party's roughly once a month for a year and a half, and we have had only one LAN party where one computer didnt refuse to talk to the others. That leaves 17 where I've spent the first 1/2 hour or so troubleshooting one or two computers. Also, by the time you get the software installed on all the computers, a decent portion of the flight will be done.

It's not worth the hassle. A laptop and a few DivX's \ DVD's, and a few headphone splitters, no problem, but a full-fledged network of more than 2 computers won't happen.

The only way that this could possibly work is FireWire. I haven't used it for LANs, but I think that you can get hubs powered off batteries / the port itself. You could even bridge computers w/o FireWire into it with crossover cables. Or you could daisy chain firewire -> firewire -> crossover -> crossover -> firewire.... Good luck.

This would probably be like 3 or 4 people. I have never run into networking problems when I network...and I've put all different things together.

Also, wouldn't it be possible to get 2 NIC's for each computer and just use a cross-over between all of the computers? Anyways, I don't think 4 cables or so going to a central source would be that hard. The cables would only have to be about 2-3' in length. I have a whole mess of short cat5 cables.

And...we can get the needed DC power from batteries. Portable power sources are cool. Also, we would preinstall the software. And anyways, I don't think Quake1 takes hours to install Especially if we get a network...just copy from one to another.

I don't think it would be hard to do...I just don't know if we would be _allowed_ to do it.