# LAN tourny routing question



## Courtjester1 (Sep 27, 2006)

Hey everyone, I'm part of a networking team that's rebuilding our local bi-annual LAN tournaments' network with new equipment. We've got the topology down and the core switches figured out but we need suggestions for routing. 



Has to have gigabit throughput and be able to support 250+ computers at once.


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## Courtjester1 (Sep 27, 2006)

I was thinking something along the lines of Cisco RV325 but I don't know if it can handle the 250 IPs


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## Courtjester1 (Sep 27, 2006)

Sorry for the constant posts i'm just thinking out loud here. If it supports say 150 IP/subnet I could just (being cisco) create another subnet to host the other 150 couldn't I? Therefore not necessarily having to worry about the IP limit. Or is that limit still going to make it tough for the router to route appropriately.


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## Wand3r3r (Sep 17, 2010)

Why would you add routing latency to a lan?

Your best performance will be with no routing and using a Class C subnet which allows 254 devices at one time.

All switches with devices should go to one backbone switch with no attached devices or only the server(s) attached for best performance.

If you needed 510 devices you would use a supernet of two class c ip ranges but again your topology would remain as I described.


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## Courtjester1 (Sep 27, 2006)

In order to do what you suggest wouldn't we need a switch with NAT support?


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## Wand3r3r (Sep 17, 2010)

There is no NAT involved unless all of these devices are going out to the internet. And if that is the case the only nat taking place is on the gateway router which has nothing to do with your lan traffic.

If just lan traffic you would not be using routers or nat since there is no reason to do so.

So why do you think you need routers or NAT for your lan party?

You superscope so you don't have to do nat. For example at work we ran out of ip addresses so we supernetted to double the available number of ips. We added no routers to accomplish this.

But if you are not going to exceed 254 devices you don't need to be concerned about supernetting.


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## Courtjester1 (Sep 27, 2006)

Ah, I get what you're saying . 

Unfortunately the meaning of LAN at these tournaments has been fizzled out to just meaning a bunch of people sitting in a big room connected to each other.

Almost every game we host has no actual LAN capability and unfortunately has to be ran over the internet. We're gonna have roughly 250 competitors not to mention the staff equipment that all needs access to the internet. 

That's why we're going with one main router that branches off to core switches but we need something with a good enough throughput to sustain everyone and keep latency down. Yet we don't want to/ can't spend $5000 on one. 

That's why I was wondering if anyone has any suggestions and if that cisco rv325 is any good.

Also, is throughput the sum of up and down. Take that rv325 for example, has a throughput of 900mbps. That's a total for upload and download?


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## Wand3r3r (Sep 17, 2010)

Most important piece of info is missing: what is the down/up for the internet connection?


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## Courtjester1 (Sep 27, 2006)

It's 1 gbit symmetrical.


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## Wand3r3r (Sep 17, 2010)

No worries there. The cisco rv325 with its gig wan port and 40,000 session capacity should work great for you.


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## Courtjester1 (Sep 27, 2006)

It says it has 900mb throughput, I'm mostly a self taught guy so I never learned much of terminology. Is throughput the combination of up and down just like bandwidth?


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## Wand3r3r (Sep 17, 2010)

I read <250 and yes that is down/up
Newegg.com - Cisco Small Business RV325-K9-NA Dual Gigabit WAN VPN Routers 40000 Simultaneous Sessions < 250Mbps


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## Courtjester1 (Sep 27, 2006)

weird this one says 900mbps. 
Buy the Cisco Small Business RV325 - router - deskt at TigerDirect.ca

Performance: NAT throughput : 900 Mbps ¦ VPN throughput (IPSec) : 100 Mbps ¦ VPN throughput (SSL) : 20 Mbps


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## Wand3r3r (Sep 17, 2010)

Link I provided is to a dual wan port router whereas your link is to a single.

Might want to do some shopping around. You should also note you will get better performance if you are able to turn off stateful packet inspection.

Best of luck


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