I sold this in 2020 when I moved to Austin. I'm building a bigger, better one here, which will be done... in about a month! (4.5 years since I first saw the property... phew.)
I'll probably publish something about the new one ~next year. :)
I published a guide and helper code for netbooting Windows machines from a single copy-on-write image here (currently in the process of updating it, it has unsurprisingly bitrotted a bit): https://github.com/kentonv/lanparty/
I really like this, it's such a fun idea and usually those never see the light of day so kudos for you to bring it to life, twice! Bringing your computer to a LAN was just annoying IMO.
I was curious maybe if you had some thoughts on the more social aspects of the project? Did you feel it made it easier to hang out on a whim for example?
For me, LAN parties were always primarily about the social aspect, not actually the gaming. The games are there to give people an excuse to get together and spend way more time in the same place than they'd normally want to.
I'd definitely say it served the purpose. We didn't really do them on a whim, but once or twice a month on a regular schedule.
It was also great for networking -- as in, people, not computers. Whenever I met someone new I'd invite them to a LAN party. People would bring their friends. Made some good connections that way. Hope to make more in Austin once the new house is ready...
Austin is a great town to be in and make connections. I've been here since 2011 and love it (except maybe the heat during some summers).
I can guarantee you that you'll be able to start some conversations based on a cool house like this! Personally, LAN parties were something I always wanted to hold more of but just didn't have many friends playing on PC while I was growing up. It's cool you've made it into such a central component of your home!
Hey, Kenton! I had the honor of attending a few events at your house. How goes?
The gaming landscape has changed a lot in the last twelve years, and I'm now a Linux-first gamer. Are you considering trusting in Proton and using Linux as the primary OS for the new house?
I’m based in Austin. Do you think we could be friends and play LAN party at your house? Primarily interested in SC2 but open to other games as well. -dude in his 30s
I regret not finding an opportunity to check the old place out on one of my many visits to the SF office, but it's awesome to see that the new place is finally coming to a close.
Didn't realize it had been so long, but I suppose I left Cloudflare like 3.5 years ago and I know it was a bit of a pain in the ass just trying to buy the property here in Austin in the first place.
I built the house for $1M and sold it ten years later for $2M. So, uh, I guess it earned me a million bucks, minus mortgage interest.
To be fair, that's just how much housing prices went up in Palo Alto over that period, not really anything to do with the specifics of the house. Got pretty lucky.
(The computers were a relatively insignificant cost compared to the house. Like $20k?)
I was hired by Google in 2005, single, no kids, no expensive hobbies, I basically didn't know how to spend money. So the bank account just kept growing and after 5 years I had enough for a down payment.
In retrospect I often regret that I never once just randomly got on a plane and flew somewhere new for fun, when it would have been easy to do so. (Kind of hard now with two young children.) But if I'd done more of that maybe I wouldn't have saved so much money.
The guide is so cool. I never knew you could netboot to multiple machines and use overlays to allow per-user modifications. It seems like a solution that could be used in a "computer lab" type scenario. Thanks for sharing!
Secondly, have you followed Linus Sebastian's ultimate tech/gaming home videos at all? He has a slightly different objective, but he's done some creative things which you may appreciate.
I've heard of him, but TBH I'm generally not into that format of YouTube video, regardless of topic. I think I'm just too impatient to wait through the parts of the video that aren't actively interesting, or are telling me things I already know.
Sorry, invites aren't open to the public, too risky. But people I invite are allowed to bring friends, so if you discover you know someone who knows me, maybe they can invite you.
Modern mansion in Germany. He invited the entire who’s who of Starcraft 2 pros and had a multi-day live-streamed tournament / house party. It was cool seeing all the big names in SC2 hanging out for much longer than an awkward five minute interview on stage at Blizzcon or IEM etc.
A half-sober iNcontrol casting on a couch with a bunch of the Koreans was just chef kiss.
It wasn’t so much the house layout or design. Just that feeling of getting everyone together for a weekend long LAN party.
Holy cow this was my dream growing up. I had designs and everything. My last LAN party was in 2005, and I never got around to it as an adult as we all kind of went our separate ways. But I've still had the dream!
Now, there are some things I would do differently here. To be a true LAN party, people need to bring their own rigs. That's half the fun. Providing the computers really defeats the purpose and makes it feel more like an internet cafe.
The question I have is, are they all in one room? Seems like there might be two, so that's good. Because one of the things I really wanted to do was have two rooms, one for each team so there was no screen cheating. Because that kinda thing happened!
The other plan I had was to have Bawls on tap. I don't know how that would have been possible, but that was baked into the design along with a soda fountain. We didn't do alcohol.
But you know what, as I thought about it more, I realized that the ad hoc nature of the LAN party was the best part. Scrounging up a 16 port switch and putting it in the middle of the floor, duct taping down the cords. Balancing the loads between walls and the inevitable tripping of breakers when some extra guests show up. Accidentally unplugging a daisy chained surge protector and turning off someone's rig, prematurely ending a 12 hour session of Age of Empires. We still talk about that to this day.
Indeed, you might even notice in the pictures that one room has a wall painted blue and the other one reddish. When people asked which team to join the answer was: "What color is the wall?" :)
That said, in practice we don't do a lot of competitive stuff. Instead we tend to prefer to focus on cooperative games, like Deep Rock Galactic, Ark, Factorio, etc. This works a lot better when everyone is somewhere between a casual vs. hardcore gamer with very different skill levels.
The one thing we regularly do play versus is Left 4 Dead 2. I've gotten pretty good at assigning my friends to teams for that one such that the games end up reasonably balanced...
Interesting backstory[1] on how Kenton found the space:
> Housing in this area is ridiculously expensive, though, and even after four or five years I had trouble finding anything I could afford. There are no empty lots here, so I'd have to tear something down, and even a run-down house in a bad neighborhood costs $450k in this area. I didn't even bother looking in Palo Alto -- it was way out of my range. That is, until something really lucky happened. A commercial establishment bordering an older residential area of town had some extra land that they weren't using. In 2009, at the low point of the recession, they put this sliver of land up for sale. I was lucky enough to look at exactly the time they did this, and with the help of a loan I was able to pick it up for a price I could actually afford.
When I was in high school going to LAN parties was my main social scene. I just loved it, even though it involved a lot of lugging around equipment to setup. We did private LANs at each others houses and we also went to larger events held at hotel conference rooms. And in those years I remember dreaming of building a place like this for myself if I ever suddenly had a lot of money. At the time I thought that was like a dream house for me, somewhere we could all gather and play computer games easily. Really neat to see that dream became someone's reality, and it doesn't even look all that complicated to put together (it even looks pretty nice!). I'll admit that in college I strayed away from the scene, I ended up just playing online much more often. I kind of miss it sometimes, but being 36 now its not something I have a lot of time for anymore, let alone gaming in the first place.
What I miss most about early 2000 during college where the lan parties. When I went first live alone I organized a party at my appartment. It had so many poeple that there was a guy sited in the toilet with the keyboard and mouse on his lap, and the monitor on the sink.
The people favorites at the timeL: Quake 3 arena, CS1.6, and Duke Nuken 3d using Dukester to play in Lan
Indeed, Linux gaming is way more viable now than it was in 2011, and it almost worked in 2011, so it probably works OK now. I have friends who I game with regularly who only use Linux and do OK.
That said I'm currently prioritizing Windows for the new house, because I know it works. Once that's all up and running I will experiment with Linux as well. Netbooting makes it easy to change OS on a whim. :)
One reason Linux would be nicer is that I know how to use a local disk (on the client machine) to hold the copy-on-write overlay, so only the base image need be served over the network (read-only). I have no idea how to make Windows do such a thing (if it's even possible) so I end up having to do all the copy-on-write stuff server-side. If I could use a local disk then it'd be much less of a performance issue when people decide to install extra games during the party.
OK scratch that, it's not "kind of annoying", it's a non-starter. Monthly subscription fee "per user" (whatever that would even mean in my situation), apparently various requirements about how it's configured (must have Active Directory?).
Aaaaand this is why all the cool stuff has to happen on the Linux side, where everything is free.
TBH it's a miracle that Windows Home supports iSCSI boot, you'd think that would be an enterprise feature for sure.
Thanks for the tip though, it was almost really cool! :/
There is a commercial tool, https://www.ccboot.com/, that exists for your use case (gaming center with netbooted clients), and iirc they provide an option for saving CoW to a local disc.
Nice, it's cool to see someone has built this out as a business!
Not the right thing for me personally, since it looks like an end-to-end solution that replaces a lot of stuff I've already figured out and customized to my liking.
Would be interesting to know how they did that local CoW... did they write a custom Windows block device driver?
For the time being I'm installing Windows 10 and setting it up without ever logging into a Microsoft account. (There's a trick during first-time setup where if you disconnect your internet, it lets you create a local-only account.) I haven't actually tried Windows 11, but I hear it makes this significantly harder or maybe impossible, which is definitely making me wary.
People at LAN parties actually do log into their own Steam accounts, but logging the whole machine into a guest's Microsoft account feels worse. Then again, I haven't tried it, maybe it'll turn out convenient, if it lets people sync their settings between machines? Note that at the end of the party, all changes anyone made to any machine are wiped out.
That said it's definitely comforting to have Linux as another option if Microsoft makes Windows unusable for this use case!
If you have a Pro license and you specify you intend to domain join the PC, Windows 11 drops you out to a local account, but there's no escape for Home licenses. It's pretty much impossible to remove that from Windows unless they decide to let you domain join from the OOBE, but that would be too convenient for sysadmins so it'll never happen.
Do you run your own Steam content caching server, or do weekly Steam Backups to have local kinda-recent images of the bigger games (or do you just download it fresh post-wipes)?
I maintain a primary disk image with all the games installed. During a party, all the machines boot from that same image, except each with a private copy-on-write overlay. Any changes made on a machine are written only to the overlay. At the end of the party I delete the overlays. The primary image remains in exactly the state it was in before the party.
So before each party I just have to install updates on one computer, like a normal person would. No need for a special cache. (Or arguably, the primary image is the "cache".)
Gotcha, so if there was a big update during a party you'd have to either let everyone update themselves; or delete their overlays, download the update to the primary, and then make new CoW overlays for everyone.
I'm not sure about op, but I actually run Lancache (lancache.net) locally on our network. It supports Steam, Windows Updates, Epic games, and pretty much anything else served over http.. (https://github.com/uklans/cache-domains).
This is all assuming you're not using a domain etc.. and have any of the myriad of other tools setup. We run lancache strictly for the fun-net segmented network.
Never really understood the appeal of that kind of LAN party TBH. Too many people, not enough socialization opportunity, might as well just play on the internet from home.
I really wouldn't enjoy facing the wall like that. For me, at least half of the fun of a LAN party was direct interaction and visuals from other fellow humans! Also, where do people sleep? Since there is not sufficient space below the tables! I wouldn't want to leave so far from my machine! ;)
And of course, it lost some of its appeal when we didn't have to carry around and set up CRTs any more.
I tested League of Legends during its closed beta in a bar like this. It was a blast when bands played. It was cool playing after hours with employees from the block too.
I worked at a little shop that built PCs in the mid-90's. The owner liked to game and always made sure the office PCs were decent-enough gaming PCs so we could have LAN parties on the weekends. It was a ton of fun and made the office PCs very nice for daily office work.
I don’t think this is how I’d design a LAN party house. I think a large round table with monitors is a more social setup, and creates equal importance amongst all the people sitting around it. There would be space in the middle section of table behind the monitors for people to connect their own rigs or setup one of the house rigs. With the right circumference, you could see up to 4 other people from any specific seating position.
I would also make the use of projectors to project live streams for different players in more social oriented areas of the house, where placing a TV would be impractical.
Pretty cool though that a LAN party house exists at all.
Sounds like your design would require a much larger space than I had. The whole house was 1426 sqft, including two bedrooms and bathrooms (not shown in the photos). Having the stations fold into the walls kept space available for normal living when not having a party.
That said I actually think a round table design would be less social. With monitors along the walls, you can easily turn around to socialize between games with nothing blocking you from seeing other people. With the table and monitors in the middle, I think monitors would block people from socializing across the table.
We'll see though, the new house actually features both designs in different rooms... :)
That’s not fair. If a person sitting at a wall can turn around to socialize, then I propose people sitting at a round table can just stand up and talk to each other in a circle.
I got my own apartment while I was still in HS, my apartment become sort of a perpetual lan party. Friends would often just leave their machines setup at my place while they went to work or school.
All machines were initially connected via coax ethernet, all sharing one 28.8 dialup connection.
A house like this was basically the most amazing thing any of us could have imagined back then.
Awesome. I remember being mildly obsessed with LAN parties when I was at uni, about the same time this house was built. My friend was working (and living) in an old office for a boat warehouse, so there were plenty of desks, power outlets and sleeping space available. We'd bring our laptops and mostly play older games. Good times.
Having done classic LAN parties for 15 years before building the house, I understand this feeling. That's why I specifically designed the house such that people could bring their own machines if they wanted.
No one ever did. The only time people ever even busted out a laptop is if all the built-in machines were occupied. But often at that point the others would just hang out until a machine became available.
The thing is, when you bring your own machine, you tend to have to spend time setting it up, installing games, updating drivers, etc. There's always that one person who has to reinstall Windows from scratch. I remember many LAN parties where we couldn't even get started until late at night. LAN parties had to be overnight affairs otherwise you couldn't get any gaming in.
With my house, I had all the machines ready to go in advance. All identically configured, all games installed, just sit down and go. It turned out really great. We could get more done in a 12-hour LAN party than most 24-hour parties, and we could still go home and sleep in our beds. (I did still have an annual 48-hour party, though.)
All this mean people were willing to do them on a monthly basis or more. Whereas in my teenage years 3-to-4 times a year was about all we could muster.
Updates? Installing games? For our last LAN I brought a machine with LanCache[0] installed and mildly warmed up. I convinced the host to finally unpack his new switch with SFP+, connected a DAC and had the host point the DNS to that machine.
Having a bunch of people install cached games at GbE speed all at once, on a 100MBit/s internet line, was pretty nice :)
Obviously with 10GbE this is limited by disk speed. But a minimal Linux can buffer a few games in 64GB of main memory.
I had it cache Steam, Epic, Riot, Blizzard and Windows Update. The cache was warmed at home over night, based on our list of "games we might play". Though Steam was limited to games I owned.
Did people have to install a custom root cert or something to get their machine to trust the cache?
In old-fashion LAN parties, we were usually copying games from each other. (Which doesn't necessarily mean piracy -- Steam is pretty good about letting you copy game files and then use them under your own account.) I feel like bandwidth wasn't the issue as much as it was troubleshooting configurations and stuff. But it was a long time ago.
When I used it at my work for a bit, it didn't require a custom root cert. Steam's client has native support for it by checking a "lancache.steamcontent.com" DNS entry. I believe the rest were served over http; it looks like EA Origin switched to https at some point and broke caching for it.
Though Steam now does support computer-to-computer transfers over LAN (added for Steam Deck). You do have to enable a setting to allow other users to download, but it's definitely less hassle.
Yeah, I remember the copying. At some parties we spent a lot of time doing that.
Some CDNs use HTTP with post-download verification (I hope). I suppose local caching is the reason for that decision; think big LAN parties with a "only" a few gigabit/s of connectivity (if at all).
A nice solution is what Steam does: The client checks a magic DNS entry (lancache.steamcontent.com), which you're intended to override [0]. It then just works.
For Riot, Blizzard, Epic and Windows Update I've set 36 overrides in dnsmasq (they supply a script for that); those are branded akamai hosts and such.
It supports more launchers and platforms/consoles, but from the big list [1] that's all we needed.
Now GOG uses HTTPS, so for the reason you stated that can't really be cached for random 3rd party machines. Subsequently, if LanCache gets an HTTPS connection, it simply proxies the encrypted connection to the correct server using SNI sniffing.
Regarding bandwidth: Two games on our list were CS:GO and LoL. IIRC four people had to install CS:GO and six people had to install LoL. We could have setup file shares, copied the data (as usual, with multiple people saturating the first share to come online, and nobody using the second or third share), hope laymen know where their steam library lives and to put the correct folder there... or just let them download the games directly from the client, except on a virtual 10 Gb/s pipe ;-)
Though to be fair: In Steam you can configure the client to allow others to download their games from you on the local network. If enabled, you can configure to share with "only me", "steam friends" and "everyone". They added the feature earlier this year[2]; probably for the Steam Deck?
One of the attendees installed Baldurs Gate 3 (>100GB) from a friend that way.
However, the local download feature wins over the lancache, which messed things up a bit when everyone installed CS:GO and pulled that from a single PC instead the server; so we had everyone disable that.
I'm now running a smaller cache on my home server. Additionally, I have a spare server sitting here that's collecting dust. I think I'll permanently designate that my LanCache server for future LAN parties.
Definitely sounds like a lifesaver for LAN parties where everyone is bringing their own machines! Or really when machines are maintained by any method other than my crazy one... :)
"The thing is, when you bring your own machine, you tend to have to spend time setting it up, installing games, updating drivers, etc. There's always that one person who has to reinstall Windows from scratch. I remember many LAN parties where we couldn't even get started until late at night. LAN parties had to be overnight affairs otherwise you couldn't get any gaming in.
Maybe for the person bringing the computer. In 1994 I picked up a dozen coax NE2000's and cables and terminators to facilitate LAN parties. So I was the guy plugging those cards into everybody's computers and setting up drivers. What a giant PITA. Those cards were cheap for a reason, there was a reason companies were dumping them en masse.
Past discussion (way back in 2011): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3342044
I sold this in 2020 when I moved to Austin. I'm building a bigger, better one here, which will be done... in about a month! (4.5 years since I first saw the property... phew.)
I'll probably publish something about the new one ~next year. :)
I published a guide and helper code for netbooting Windows machines from a single copy-on-write image here (currently in the process of updating it, it has unsurprisingly bitrotted a bit): https://github.com/kentonv/lanparty/