xargol's weblog

Some years ago there were a lot of LAN-parties being held here in the Lillehammer area, and they were mostly both quite popular and successful. However, in the recent couple of years there haven’t been any activity, except for a few LAN-parties held in smaller areas around Lillehammer like Brøttum, Gausdal, and so on.

A couple of friends of mine and I figured we’d do something about this, so last fall we got together and founded an organization called “LillehammerLAN“, with the purpose of arranging a LAN-party/computer party in the Lillehammer area.

We created LillehammerLAN as a non-profit, democratic organization, so that we would be eligible to join an association called “Hyperion” — the “Norwegian Association for Fantastic Activities”. This is an association for organizations practicing so-called “fantastic activities”, i.e. role playing, computer parties, and so on. KANDU, the organization annually arranging The Gathering, one of the world’s largest computer parties, also participates in Hyperion. Through our membership in Hyperion we get several benefits, one of them being financial support from the government.

LillehammerLAN’s first event was held this weekend. The event was held in the sports hall at Jorekstad, just outside of Lillehammer. We had about 130 participants, and the event lasted from Friday until Monday (the winter holidays in Lillehammer started this week, so we extended the event with one day). We had competitions in Counter-Strike 1.6, Warcraft 3: The Frozen Throne, Stepmania, Trackmania and World of Warcraft, in addition to several smaller competitions. Our network was of gigabit speed (the first one at a LAN-party in Lillehammer ever), and we had a 50 Mbps Internet connection.

I would say the event went very smoothly, and we didn’t experience any major problems; the network worked without a hitch, the Internet connection was more or less stable, and none of the participants caused any trouble.

My duties in the crew were the administrative and financial stuff, the network, the Internet connection and the website. In addition to this I am the chairman of the board in the organization, with the two other crew members being board members.

Our network was a simple layer 2 star topology network, with most of the equipment rented from a computer party called Polar Party (which, by the way, also participates in Hyperion). The Internet connection was routed through to the LAN by a server powered by SmoothWall. The website was designed and coded by me, and it features seat reservation, registration of pre-payments for the tickets, competition signups, forums, bulk sending of e-mails to the participants, etc.

Some pictures from the weekend:

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I think LillehammerLAN’s first event turned out great, and we will certainly look at arranging more events in the future.