The Promised LAN

This is a pretty amazing setup! I think in 2025 I would definitely prefer something like this. However, I think back in "the day" part of what made LAN parties fun was that everyone's PC was so individualized. I remember all of my high school friends and I coming of age and building our PCs. I helped a lot of my friends build their PCs and we all chose different things (such as the amount of RGB LEDs, which I thought were tacky...). I remember a friend of a friend had a water cooling system and I was so excited about checking it out. Also, things like the desktop wallpaper you chose, etc, contributed to this. There was something very magical about it all. Lugging our PCs to each others houses was a real labor of love.

The Promised LAN is a bit of a WAN party, but I would say that "LAN party" can certainly be assumed to include virtual LANs.

I'm even willing to say that a get-together of friends in the same location playing the same online game (perhaps using laptops / handhelds / tablets / smartphones / etc.) still fits the spirit of the LAN party, even though it might technically be over a WAN. (Former LAN game series like Diablo have evolved in this direction, for better or worse, and MMOs were always in this space. It's still a blast to play them with people in the same room.)

The best LAN party is the one that you are part of.

That website was a very fun read :) what a cool place and so awesome to have so many friends to play with.

This line made me chuckle:

> I suggested to Jade: Should we move to Austin? Jade initially said no, because she wanted our kids to benefit from Palo Alto's school district. At the time, it was rated #12 in the nation. But, looking closer at the rankings revealed a surprise: The Eanes school district in Austin was #8. When I showed this to Jade, she changed her mind.

Could tell your wife was Chinese without even seeing the name. Chinese parents will made radical housing decisions for their children, even just to move from #12 to #8, lol. Love this.

In 1999 or so, there was a exclusive demo of Unreal Tournament you could download and play if you had a 3dFX video card. However, someone found out if you created a text file called "glide2.dll" in the game binary directory, you could run the demo in a software rendered mode.

At the time, I worked for a company with a large training room full of computers. The room had locking doors, and a small, narrow window in only one door. We made a cardboard cutout that fit into that window perfectly, and painted it flat black. If you put it in the inside of the window, it appeared as if the room was empty and dark. We called it the "beat-down screen".

We loaded up the UT demo on every machine in that room, and used to get a bunch of like-minded gamers to come down at the end of the work day and we'd play the three demo maps for hours. We eventually added Half-Life deathmatch (I loved the snark pit map) and Counterstrike. None of those machines had discrete video cards, so we had to run in software rendering mode on all games, at something ridiculous like 320x200, but it was glorious.

Good times.

I agree with that: to me a LAN Party is about having the players physically in the same place.

I don't call it a LAN Party when I plan an evening to play with my remote friends, it's just a "game night".

Haha, have to drop the link to the recent Linus Tech Tips video on your house!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=97Y0MVUgjOw

Funnily enough the (only) LAN parties I ever experienced "back in the day" were pretty similar to yours:

1. there was one smallish computer lab tucked under a stairs in the science department in university, in which all of the computers had been "compromised" in some fashion & games installed for student LAN parties. Mainly after hours for those living on campus.

2. In the first tiny little company I ever worked for we'd have them in the office on occasion.

For your "traditional" types - how did people transport their computers? Laptops?

Big fan of both your LAN houses! One thing I noticed is that you don't seem to have any art/pictures/decorations on any of your walls. Is that an intentional choice?

Actually the manifesto is linked in the second paragraph. Reading this page and then the manifesto was good experience for me.

Thanks for linking that, I missed it when skimming the original link earlier. I find that quite a heart warming story which makes me want to set up something similar, I was particularly tickled by the thermal receipt printers for sending each other messages.

Wow. This is the best part of it. Thanks.

True but when ICANN decides .tpl is a new TLD owned by some corporation, what's your next move?

dn42 is really fun tinkering with, it feels very much like connecting to the real internet.

The set of internal services is growing too.

> But it sounds like one big "no girls allowed" kind of treehouse

There is absolutely nothing wrong with this. It's actually completely fine, and good, for people to voluntarily form social groups based on a shared interests and traits. The movement to oppose this sort of thing has been a large factor in the deterioration of social life for many people. You are not entitled to membership in a community of close-knit friends.

It doesn't necessarily look like something that was built to be submitted to HN or be interesting to outsiders.

No games are played on TPL. It's more just socializing. There's IRC and stuff, and people host weird things.

When you join TPL you get a generated LaTeX document with all your connection-specific details. That document breaks down kind of _everything_ you need to know to join, and then you're paired up with one of those primary backbone people to connect.

Seems more like a semi-private friends-of-friends network. It wouldn't be surprising if it turned out to have skewed representations as most of these do by nature of the semi-private nature.

This seems like way to much effort for playing video games which can be done easier with discord. With how tight lipped they are with what their actual service is, it gives off file sharing vibes.

it's made clear from the outset this article is not attempting to recruit members, but to promote the concept

Why would you assume they play games instead of socializing? Talking about no girls allowed...

They probably use L2TP with IPsec to get Layer 2 transit. Doing that over Wireguard would require Gretep or something similar

My personal choice for something like this would be Tailscale/Headscale. Runs over Wireguard and handles a ton of niceties like DNS for connected nodes automatically.

I use IPSec only because Macs, iPhones, etc have built-in support, and so does my router by coincidence. I don't want to install extra stuff.

I mean, this is pretty much the standard of setting up satellite offices for businesses and whatnot. Lots of people are extremely familiar with IPSec, it's not that hard.

Note that encryption is illegal in ham radio - and they don't care that you're tunneling some other protocol for which encryption is standard - it's still illegal.

It's possible to use ham skills to make links that are not ham-class though, of course. For example encryption is (typically) legal on ISM band general use licenses (such as used by wifi).

Some people have just opened up their entire home networks, other people have VLANs set up and only share that VLAN with TPL. However, as written in the article, everyone knows at least a few other people on TPL and that interpersonal real life trust is what keeps people from screwing around on everyone else's networks. Everyone is also an adult.