Lan Gaming Center

[HUmar_Est]

First time posting, not sure if this is where i should post it but i got a question

So i have 18 machines in my center and each time there is an update of steam games, league of legends, battle.net games i have to update each computer individually which consumes a LOT of time, and bandwith.

So my question is, what would be the best solution to have 1 computer updated, and the rest of the PC's update from it automatically via LAN?? software with file synch?? iSCSI?? can NAS do this?? 

Thank you so much in advance for answering this ! (I live in Ecuador so the bandwidth is not that great, its takes a lot of time to update all machines individually)

[DioOmicida]

Have you looked into VM? 

[Bl00dgod]

what OS are you using?

windows server has functions where you download software xy and the server deploys it to all clients (WSUS windows server update service)

 

if i'm not wrong linus used 1 seperated hard drive in the "7gamer in 1 pc build" where everyone loaded the games etc

[leadeater]

Your two best options are:

1. Setup a web cache server i.e. Squid and force cache any steam/game update traffic. This will reduce bandwidth usage for all but the first download and is the simplest setup regarding clients as no changes are required. The downside to this is that anything not in the cache will be downloaded from the internet as normal and caching isn't perfect but does work extremely well.
2. Use a script to copy the contents of the steam library/game content from a designated primary computer to all other computers over night. You will also want to disable all other clients from being able to automatically download game updates. The downside to this is that not all games like to be copied around to other computers like this.

A third option, and you should take this with extreme caution, is to setup all computers to PXE boot from a master image. All you have to do is keep the master image up to date and for the computers to pickup the newest changes is just a reboot. This should only be done if you have strong networking skills and have done extensive testing to make sure it works.

 

Fourth option which is similar to the third is to setup Windows Deployment Services (WDS) and keep a master image up to date and then re-image all computers over night. This is slightly safer than the third option but still carries a fair amount of risk if you make a mistake in the master image and takes much longer to roll out the fix. I would do this over option three personally.

 

Of the four options, and I'm sure there are more ways to do this, I would first go with option one. It is the easiest to setup, the most reliable and safest of them all. If your internet connection is too slow for this to work well enough my second pick would be option four but this is something I am very familiar with since I have managed computer networks with many thousands of computers using very similar methods.

 

I would also not be surprised if there are software products designed specifically for your setup to solve the problem you have.

[HUmar_Est]

thank you su much for your answer  i will definitely look into the cache server 

[legopc]

On 4/28/2016 at 4:44 PM, leadeater said:

1. Setup a web cache server i.e. Squid and force cache any steam/game update traffic. This will reduce bandwidth usage for all but the first download and is the simplest setup regarding clients as no changes are required. The downside to this is that anything not in the cache will be downloaded from the internet as normal and caching isn't perfect but does work extremely well.

^^This, please dont go and virtualise all you pc's because linus did it. A caching server is your best bet. LAN party's also use caching servers seeing as game updates do take up a lot of bandwidth and that could kill the internet connection if people havent updated their games at home, a patch comes out or they want to try something new.