Hi folks,
Every year since 2013, together with around 25 friends, we have held a 24-hour NERD event to play games, both digital and non-digital.
Over the last few years, I have devoted my efforts to improving the networking setup, moving from Wi-Fi only to fully wired Ethernet. In recent editions, however, it became almost too easy thanks to a gigabit connection and everything being cabled.
This year we are changing location, moving to a different house belonging to one of the group. Unfortunately, the internet connection there is provided via radio (I don’t know the exact technology or frequency used) by the ISP EOLO (Italy), with a theoretical bandwidth of 300 Mbps download and 50 Mbps upload.
I’m here to ask for suggestions on what I can do to improve the overall quality. It may be better to do nothing at all, but it is also a good opportunity to learn something new and improve my knowledge of networking.
Here is what I have planned so far:
• Main router (hEX S or RB5009) connected to the antenna, then a 50 m fiber link to the main switch (1 GbE or 10 GbE, depending on the router)
• Three different areas, each with a managed switch and separate VLANs: PC, Console, TV, and Management, with no interconnection between them
• One DHCP server per VLAN
• Pi-hole for DNS
I also have some ideas about traffic shaping, but I’m a noob, such as:
• Limiting the WAN bandwidth to prevent a single user from saturating the link
• Defining traffic priorities (e.g. UDP traffic and applications like Discord)
• Blocking Windows Update and similar services during the event
• Generating notifications via scripts when someone exceeds a defined bandwidth threshold
I hope this can spark interest and encourage others to have fun planning this with me!
Thanks in advance for your time and help.