During my time in the Temple University ACM, we threw a few LAN parties. For a few of them, I was in charge of network/server operations. I decided that it'd be nice to share how we had our LANs set up so that other people could hopefully gain something useful from our experience.
Machine Setup
We just used a standard P4 machine that we had laying around. The only hardware modification is that we added extra ethernet cards to it so that we can keep some traffic separate. When setting up the machine, we chose to use Ubuntu Linux. All of the games that we were serving has services that would run on Linux, plus Ubuntu has packages available for Samba file sharing, HTTP, and DHCP services. While installing Ubuntu, we decided to use a software RAID0 so speed up disk access. Everything else was a default install.
Serving Game Files
Most of the games we were playing were open source. Since we didn't have an internet connection in the room, it made sense to include things like Urban Terror and Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory right on our server for people who may not have already had them installed. This is where our Samba server and extra network cards came in handy. We didn't want download traffic to interrupt people who were already in the middle of a game, so we dedicated one of the ethernet cards for Samba traffic and shared out all of our game files. Now, anyone could walk it, grab some software without bugging other people, and go!
Game Hosting
Once people had the files they needed, they could connect to our game server. Once again, our added ethernet cards came in handy. We would launch one or two game servers per network card, ensuring that we didn't encounter any lag due to high volume. Each game service was launched manually in a separate terminal so that the sever admin could keep an eye on things. This way, we could catch problems as they happened.
General Info
So, how did people know where to find our Samba share? How did they know the server IP/ports for the different games? Simple: We set up a website and wrote that URL on our white board. Once a player plugged in and booted, they could navigate to this URL and get all of the general info they needed to hop into the fray. Ubuntu had a package for Drupal, so we used a default Drupal install and went from there. We added things like the game download location, the location of the different game servers, how to install the software and connect to our servers, and the default user names and passwords for said services. This way, each player had a way to help them selves -- they didn't have to keep asking the port number for Urban Terror. Instead, they could just look it up!
Added Bonus - HTTP Services
So, we had to install Apache in order to host Drupal. When playing Urban Terror and Enemy Territory, we sometimes played on maps that users didn't already have. One of the cool things that these games can do is to defer a user to an HTTP URL in order to download said maps. So, we bound our HTTP services to yet another card and used it to host our general information and game maps. This ensured that users got a fast map download without interrupting the users who were in progress.
Overall
This setup worked really well for us. I've been to LAN parties in the past where a late-comer meant a good 20 minutes of lag while they connected to the server to get what they needed. Thanks to our setup, we encountered no lag, minimized confusion, and kept everyone doing what they came to do -- have fun and goof off!