Heh, of all arguably-valid definitions of "LAN Party" I think this one is as far away from mine as you can get.
Traditional LAN party: Everyone brings their computers to one place to connect via a LAN, where they play games, swap files, demo stuff to each other, etc.
My LAN party: All my friends come over to my house and use the computers that I have already set up for them. Nobody brings their own. The point is to interact face-to-face, with video games as a catalyst. Swapping files and demos doesn't really happen since nobody brought their own computer. (My house: https://lanparty.house)
The Promised LAN Party: The LAN is extended, virtually, across multiple houses, so that the participants can play games, swap files, and demo stuff without actually leaving home. It's arguably no longer "local" but functionally it enables the same activities as a LAN party, other than the face-to-face interaction part.
I wonder who gets told their definition is "wrong" more. :)
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.
And a real risk of a shattered CRT screen! I remember carting my bougie 17” Viewsonic around in the back of my Hyundai Excel and wondering if it would pick up a crack along the voyage…
CRTs might tougher than we gave them credit for. I once dropped a Sony Trinitron from shoulder height when it hit a low ceiling. Didn't crack. Still worked. (And yes, this was at a LAN party.)
When I was a kid we threw out our old B&W tv. I wanted to smash the CRT but had heard that they could explode so from a distance I fired several .22 bullets at the screen. They had no effect. IIRC the screen wasn't damaged at all? I can hardly believe what I'm writing but it was true
CRTs have to maintain a near-vacuum inside IIRC. So it's probably a matter of safety to make them strong; if they're too delicate and get mishandled, they implode and some hapless consumer gets a face full of glass.
Wouldn't imploding rather than exploding prevent the face full of glass? But I suppose it has to be pretty strong to maintain that vacuum even if they assumed no one ever touched, moved, or got near it.
Back in the hayday of lan parties in like 1995-1997 my only monitor was a absolute boulder of a 21" viewsonic (this is pre flatscreen or rather pre decent flatscreens, you could get like 15-17s but they were expensive and absolute trash). One night coming home from the bars, half drunk, in an alley my friend and I found an abandoned (maybe..) horizontal-able handtruck. Made the lan party load unload so much better.
In the previous century i visited many lan parties with my absolute beast of a pc case (an old Siemens 4U 19" metal monster where i stuffed an Amd Athlon setup in with a bunch of harddrives) that i got for free from somewhere. Then carried the huge CRT screen and placed it on top of it. It was insane, i was young (and insane), but i got it all dirt cheap. Most people loved it. And even back then repurposing discarded or super cheap hardware for as long as possible for as many functions as possible gave me much joy and saved me a great bunch of money.
If i had to do a "lan party" these days i'd just connect my Steam Deck to some hdmi beamer and play Jackbox games with a bunch of people.
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.
For my definition, I totally don't care whether the server is local or in the cloud. I have a fast enough internet connection that it won't make a difference. (I mean. I would _like_ servers to be local, but I'm not going to refuse a game just because it uses cloud servers.)
The important thing is only that the players are local.
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.
I was in high school in the late 90s to early aughts. The school system used Novell NetWare with Windows NT workstations. At the time, their security was lax. In fact, they set up the directory so that by default, every user logged in using the first four letters of their first name coupled with the last four letters of their last name as the username, and the last four digits of their phone number as their password. I realized this also applied to school employees. Most of whom never changed their password. All of whom were local administrators for computers. Some of whom had network administration rights.
I used multiple school officials' accounts to log in, push a copy of UT99, filled with custom maps, to a network share. We would then copy that folder to the hard drive of the school computers and play UT99 on them. We had amazing LAN parties where we would find empty computer labs after school and play games for hours.
They had BNC networking in that building at the time. It took "forever" in my mind to copy the game from the network share to the local hard drive. Totally worth it.
In those days they even let us maintain the high school website using Dreamweaver...
I was a sophomore in college in '99-00 and they had just brought in new Power Mac G4 machines with ATI Rage 128 16MB AGP cards. They were faster and better than anything I had used to that point and it also was around when Unreal Tournament was released which was a big deal. I was the administrator of this lab and was supposed to oversee students working on video and audio projects. But instead, we had epic UT tournaments and better yet, I got paid to be there. I also had keys to get into the lab so we would catch a buzz and play for hours.
My high school computer lab in 1998-99 was full of Windows 98 machines running a program called "Fortress" which was meant to lock it down and prevent tampering.
I made a custom boot disk (floppy) that would boot Windows bypassing Fortress. It was pretty easy.
During computer programming class I'd install Worms on the machine and we'd all play.
The instructor was a cool guy and said it was fine as long as we were getting our work done.
On one of the tests he included a question: "Who is the master of the ninja rope?"
Honestly I think interviews are just not something Linus does a lot of. He has a particular workflow where he writes a script for himself and then acts it out for the camera. Changing it up would be going outside his comfort zone and there wasn't a lot of time.
That said there is a "behind the scenes" video where we initially toured him through the house which is a lot more conversational, but it's on their pain subscription service.
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?
You just loaded up your enormous full tower PC and 17 inch CRT monitor in the back of your friend's brother's cousin's friend's station wagon, and made it happen. I had a Rubbermaid tub that I would use to lug the tower and all the necessary cables and accessories. A properly gaming-specced laptop would have been absurdly expensive (they still are) and a bit like cheating anyway.
I had a lanboy? case that came with a carry strap. The case was also mostly aluminum so it was pretty light. Not many people had laptops back then. Managers at work maybe had one. Most people had a proper desktop.
Laptops??? There weren't gaming-capable laptops in the 90's, and besides that, the ultimate status symbol at a LAN party was lugging in your 80-pound 20" Sony Trinitron CRT.
I vividly remember the desk holding my 15" Trinitron slowly bending under the load, but I don't know what it would have weighed. I'd imagine that 20" was a bear to get out of the car and make your way inside with.
Similarly, I'm not sure how 13 or 14 year old me got a 27" Trinitron TV downstairs by myself. 34 year old me would need an entire bottle of Advil for sure.
I did bring my dell craptop with that I scrounged parts from 3 nonworking used business ones together...it had the ATi Mobility 1 (Rage 128?) and could do half life 1 if you really tweaked things or Quake 3.
That aside, it sucked performance wise even with a Pentium 3. My main PC and 19in monitors were what we drug around to LANs all over.
There used to be an old movie theater in North Branch MN that was converted to basically a permanent LAN Party where people would just come and go.
Movies and bands would play on the stage on weekends or something, too. Best time of my life.
This is what I thought which is what confused me - I guess lugging around CRTs just seemed a little much.
I don't live in the US though so perhaps we just missed out on that rite of passage not living somewhere where kids are more likely to have access to a car.
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?
At the time the pictures were taken, we hadn't gotten around to populating the walls much. Now we've hung up a lot of our kids' art, nicely framed. Amusingly a lot of it looks sort of like abstract modern art, like Jackson Pollock or Rothko, enough so to confuse guests. :)
Abstract modern art seems to have some things in common with some kids' art: focus on materials, color, texture, perception; and representational art may focus on symbolism rather than realistic rendering. There's also an authenticity to art that is created for personal expression without worrying what other people will think about it.
It's hard to capture three dimensional physical art in two dimensions and/or digitallly, even more so when the art is abstract. The context and interaction with the physical environment can also be important.
Indoor plants are tricky with cats. They will chew on them, and many plants can be poisonous to them. Also keeping them watered is work, and they can create a mess if they grow in the wrong direction.
Do y'all get mosquitos on the roof? My back patio is screened in and some are still sneaking through. Would love to know the wired-ethernet-certainty type of approach to dealing with this.
Hybrid LANs are also pretty good. During the Christmas-New Year break, old school friends would often have a LAN party with ZeroTier or similar set up, so people who couldn't make it could still drop in and out. You'd get a great LAN party vibe from the room full of PCs and ethernet cables everywhere, but you'd also get much higher player counts. Everyone wins.
I think we can welcome virtual LAN parties into the fold, especially post-pandemic. Also games like Diablo 4 have given up on LAN and are WAN-only (though there is couch co-op?) but still fun to play in person, as are MMOs, online team FPS, etc.
Interesting! I grew up before network cards was a thing in home computers (Commodore 64 and Amiga), but a group of my friends organized what we called «meetings» which I would characterize as your traditional LAN party. I remember at some point that we hooked up two Amigas over a fairly long parallel cable and were able to send data across. Cannot recall if we actually were able to copy larger files between them though. Fun times!
To me, one of the defining features of a LAN party is a single broadcast domain. I thought that is what this was, at first, but it is actually an L3 overlay network with DNS and BGP and the whole nine yards. Somewhat a stretch for a LAN. :D
Absolutely. I think while plenty of games now can rely on UDP hole punching or file sharing can be done with centralized cloud storage, part of the earlier LAN appeal was sharing a segment together and all the ease that brought.
OS's like Windows can easily share folders and printers, games (particularly older ones) run LAN discovery off of broadcasts, and the lot. Sure, sometimes you can route it, but when I think LAN, I think back to the wireless bridges in a neighborhood LAN between houses we would setup - ARPs and all, in a big messy broadcast domain that worked well enough.
Today I think I'd reach for GRE tunnels to add that functionality if I was them. Otherwise, this is just the Internet with more steps.
It doesn’t capture the spirit of a group of friends getting together to play video games in a shared space? Or there’s a different definition of the LAN party spirit that somehow entirely precludes that aspect?
Like I could understand saying it misses out on the aspect of literally bringing your individual PCs, missing out on the neatness of everyone’s individuality as another commenter pointed out, but I don’t think they’d agree that the in person, gaming in the same place aspect is entirely precluded from “the spirit”
You are trying to deconstruct something, keeping part of it and calling it the same. You seem to be making my argument for me, so I have nothing to add.
Ah yes, spending an hour getting setup then at least two peoples computers don't boot or the GPU doesn't work...then no one has or installed any of the games you're hosting. Good memories
Obviously, as you predicted, the first reaction is "how do you afford all of that", which is a silly question, because the answer is "just be in the right place in the right moment".
Now, the second question is how do you get to actually organize a big party? My experience is that in modern times it's very difficult to maintain an extensive social network. First, people live far away from each other, so visiting someone becomes a journey. Second, people have shit to do, and when you invite them for a beer it usually means asking them to give up something else in that time (like taking care of their kids). Third, in the age of hyperindividualism it's difficult to meet people you vibe with, because everyone has their own distinct personality and the era of shared values and hobbies seems to be gone.
That allowed us to play Warcraft II with strangers on the Internet.
Wild times!
P.S: my very best LAN that said was a coax cable going through the window directly to my neighbours' house. Brothers in each house made for nice Warcraft II games.
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.
> We're using our own non-standard and possibly ill-advised TLD, which is .tpl — short for The Promised LAN.
Not ill advised at all. The internet was never meant to be centralized; more should be done to resist the ICANN hegemony. The replacement for manually swapping host file entries ought to have been something that placed control over identity in the hands of the individual instead of selling it.
No description of the games they even play? It's an interesting idea. But it sounds like one big "no girls allowed" kind of treehouse with how minimally forthcoming they are about documentation
> 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.
Read the manifesto, linked there and in the comments here. Its entire membership
is 19 close friends and they won't let anyone new join who hasn't already been friends with one of them for at least 10 years.
They're just sharing the idea because they like what they've built and think other people could have fun building something similar. It's like a treehouse enthusiast putting some pictures of the cool treehouse they've made on their website. It's not an invitation to come and hang out in it.
I suppose, if you're the sort of person whose response to finding pictures of someone's treehouse on the web is to complain there are no pictures of people playing games in it.
Context is important. If the pictures are captioned "check out this awesome treehouse I built" then yeah I don't expect anything further.
Whereas if they are captioned "this treehouse is my absolute favorite place to hang out" or "everyone should build one of these for themselves" or "building this treehouse saved my relationship" or whatever then I am going to find myself wondering why that might be.
Like if I tell you that Python is just the best language ever and you ought to be using it for approximately everything you do because it will improve your life or society or perhaps even the universe as a whole, might you not wonder _why_ I think that?
I don't know why we're even having this debate, but this thread is in response to someone literally complaining they didn't say what games they play on it (as if they necessarily even do). They've given plenty of technical info about it - certainly more than they're obliged to, which is none - and anyone who would do something like this is going to do it their own way anyway.
I'm clearly in the target audience as I'm now considering doing something like this. The page gives me all the information I need or want.
Probably because I'm in the same camp as the person you originally responded to. It's an intriguing project and clearly a lot of effort has gone into it so I'm left wondering about how it's being used. If I were going to build something similar (as they advocate) what might I use it for?
> around half of the people on the LAN have thermal receipt printers with open access, for printing out quips or jokes on each other’s counters.
> there’s a 3-node IRC network, exotic hardware to gawk at, radios galore, a NAS storage swap, LAN only email, and even a SIP phone network of “redphones”.
The above is from the linked essay about the current sordid state of the internet. It gives a few ideas for fun pastimes but honestly not a lot. Gaming with close friends is probably the majority of what I'd use a LAN setup like this for so naturally I'm left curious what I might be missing out on.
I guess you're not into networking? If so, perhaps what seems obvious to me isn't obvious to you: the network is the toy. Building it is the game. The purpose isn't the things you can do with it, it's how you do them and who you do them with. Two cans and a piece of string is still fun in the age of cellphones, and a treehouse is still fun to be in when you have a nice living room with a telly.
If the idea of setting up one of these doesn't sound like fun in its own right, I wouldn't recommend attempting it.
Same reason as any other LAN party though. Like, you (average HN user) probably would wonder what's in the treehouse. But show it to a 9 year old and they'll say: fuck yeah, awesome treehouse, I want one. Filling it with activities comes later.
DN42 (https://dn42.network/) is kind of like this but public, mostly used to play with networking technologies though you could also use it to make a virtual LAN party.
Note: If you do, you should probably check the paths your traffic takes and get consent of everyone on the path, since most people expect to mostly pass network-control traffic and some nodes have very limited bandwidth. Fortunately, AS-paths in DN42 are usually quite short. If all your LAN party traffic is confined to your own network then obviously it's not a problem.
If you built one of these you could also connect it to DN42 as-is, being aware more people will be able to access your network if not firewalled.
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.
I was teasing you and the op because you both made hedges ("seems", "sounds") when it was very clearly stated in the very first eight words of the first sentence of the first paragraph on that site.
I've never tried to join, so I don't know how exclusive it is. There are private clubs and groups that you just need to ask and they'll let you join. Others do a lot of vetting. If it's the former, it's not all that private.
I already did read the article and I did not get that impression. If it's really that small and private, why mamke a website about it for friends and prospective members? Why architecture the network in a way that favors scaling, including mulitple backbone nodes running diverse software with the option to add more? Clearly these indicate thats it's not that small or exclusive. I would bet that if you were to bump into someone at DEF CON and they were a member, all you'd have to do to join is say "that's so cool, how can I join".
It is as small as it says. BGP/IPSec might be silly at its size, but it was also the path of least resistance given the background of the people in the Bureau of Lan Management. I guess it was also for lolz to see if these things could be made stable and reliable without the big-organization clownery that we constantly run into.
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.
They are using BGP and routing nodes (backbones), recreating a mini IP (layer 3) network I think.
I've used raw wireguard in a p2p fashion to interconnect LANs. I run wireguard on each segment directly inside the network routers.
Just make sure all LANs are using a different subnet. A /24 is standard. Then configure all the peers and you get a fully peer to peer network. No relays. You only need one side of every peer "pair" to be reachable from the internet.
I do have a small management script to help peer discovery (dynamic IPs) and key exchange, but it's not strictly required. With a dozen nodes or so, it's maintainable manually. Wireguard supports roaming natively, as long as one peer can reach the other.
That is correct. IPSec sucks but we have already paid the price of being forced to figure it out in big organizations, so, not much motivation to figure out another thing.
I have my own Wireguard mesh network between my home network and a couple of VPSes. I configured it all manually, too. I'm basically running a virtual public network and have it routing a /24 (BGP announced at the VPSes) back to my home.
A little morbid, but have you considered setting up a beneficiary for the allocation or detailing this asset in a will? That's some special, virtual real estate you have there.
The only use case I can imagine is a legacy game which performs a server search by broadcasting/scanning the local network. And even then - most of the time these games had server browsers.
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.
This kind of defeats the purpose of TPL. Part of TPL is setting up your own network segment. There's a dashboard that shows who has what working.
Part of the fun of TPL isn't just that your computer can talk to another computer, it's that you have your own setup configured form the ground up so your /24 can talk to other /24s on TPL. I 100% understand some people will not enjoy that and won't find it fun, and that is ok. Some people do enjoy learning new things about setting up infrastructure, and this scratches some of that itch.
I personally ran into the legacy setup issue for running vanilla Wireguard for my setup before Tailscale is a thing and have to manually manage keys, routing and DNS.
But one thing Tailscale has that annoyed me is that they are using 100.64 CGNAT addresses (which is more RFC-compliant) but conflicts with one of my cloud service provider's pre-configured DNS, NTP and software mirrors setup. Using it became more or less messy for this reason.
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.
I really like this, no feeds, no algorithms, just a network to do cool stuff with like minded people. Things like this are the answer to people complaining about the current state of the Internet. Making a network and getting your friends to use is how it all started.
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).
I love this idea, not least of all because it was one of the things on my "todo" pile that never gets any smaller. Congratulations guys. I miss the small community I found on the early Internet, before Eternal September. When small groups of people get together in a space that is both "confined" and "limitless" great things can happen.
I've been wanting to do this for ages. Originally I wanted to do this at the home router level, but that quickly got shut down when I got a test net up and running and my friends could control the Chromecasts in my house.
For us a "tailscale" equivalent with SoftEther is what we used to manage the DNS/Tunneling for our fileshare/services.
So cool to see more people playing in this space. Please post more! <3
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.
I'm one of the people whose home LAN is completely exposed to TPL. There's an amount of "screwing around" where I wouldn't care. If you want to print an xkcd cartoon to my desk, fine, lol, a minor surprise in my day. If you print 1000 pages of dicks while I'm not home so that my paper and toner run out, that would be uncool. After years of caring about this problem, I came to believe that this kind of normative social contract cannot scale to include "everyone in the entire world," and that this kind of unwritten normative code is the only thing that makes any social space tolerable.
I would love to learn more about how to set something like this up. I hope this group will consider open-sourcing more tools and instructions for others who hope to follow in their footsteps.
As some other commenters have said, Headscale/Tailscale scratches some of this itch for me. Having individual devices connect directly to an overlay network is fabulous. However, I can never fully control Tailscale the way I wish to, and connecting networks together with it is difficult.
I love this idea and have considered doing something similar with friends for years. It’s cool to see how far they’ve taken it — much bigger than I had envisioned.
My biggest/only concern - which they gloss over, mostly — is security. Combining networks puts added responsibility on every family that joins. What if friend-X’s kid downloads a virus-riddled torrent, which is capable of multiplying across hosts?
Your own hosts/perimeter can always be protected, but there’s a loss of control with this setup.
Maybe I'm missing something important. Is this purely an overlay network on top of regular IP with regular ISPs? Or have the got their own physical layer that I missed during reading? My confusion comes from LAN usually implying physical layer colocation. Otherwise, wouldn't it be a WAN?
The network is made up of independently operated and heterogeneous nodes (currently three nodes, a mix of Debian using strongSwan and OpenBSD using iked), which peer over IPSec links.
It's a VPN connecting sites together to form something like a LAN, but geographically separated. Multinational company "LAN"s are set up in a similar fashion.
I find it funny how the manifesto complains about AI so much; meanwhile, my AI-friendly friend group uses these exact kinds of private servers/networks to get away from the hordes of AI haters and harassment on the public Internet.
But I guess that's fine. We can each have our own spaces, and never the twain shall meet.
The idea is to be a space where existing social groups play, rather than a wider community - it's inherently based on a level of pre-existing trust. Writing about it is supposed to be an incentive for people to build their own little spaces where they can share weird stuff that should never be near the public internet - it's cool to have a network of thermal printers that people can submit jokes to, but it only really works if access is somewhat limited.
The SIP "redphones" is an idea I really like. My wife managed to get a SIP IP phone from one of her buy-nothing groups that I've been meaning to setup an Asterisk server for just to mess with. Maybe stick it upstairs where my kid likes to play & let him get the experience of using a "real" phone.
It is pretty funny to be able to dial an extension from your desk phone to get the IVR of paultag's Christmas tree, but man does managing asterisk suck.
>As a result, membership will never be open, and we will never have enough connected LANs to deal with the technical and social problems that start to happen with scale. This is a feature, not a bug.
>This is a call for you to do the same. Build your own LAN. Connect it with friends’ homes. Remember what is missing from your life, and fill it in. Use software you know how to operate and get it running. Build slowly. Build your community. Do it with joy.
DN42: build a second internet to learn how it works. Public, no privacy features.
Yggdrasil: build a next generation Internet with some privacy features, and self-organization without central assignment
Tor/I2P: build a completely private internet, but sacrificing speed and the ability to operate on the base layer. (Yggdrasil and DN42 and TPL can run on individual one-to-one links, but Tor and I2P assume existing any-to-any connectivity on the layer beneath, which means you already need an internet)
Yes, everyone is pretty technical. The author of this article (ptag) spends a decent amount of time helping the people out who aren't as well-versed in infrastructure/networking.
It's not really custom. It's industry standard protocols for connecting independent (one might say "autonomous") networks.
Tailscale is this on easy mode, of course. There's a blog post by apenwarr somewhere that I can't find right now that lays out the fundamental thesis of Tailscale and its very similar to these folks' manifesto.
The custom jiggery pokery is the point. This is like telling someone to throw away their hobby car they work on over the weekends and replace it with a new electric vehicle because it'll, "Just work." The configuring things, understanding the infrastructure, that is _the point_.
Hypothetically, it be possible to achieve the same thing with a shared tailscale network, right? But can you kinda "federate" tailnets like this? So independent tailnets owned and run by individuals, but networked together into an inter-tailnet?
You miss the fun and games of running your own DNS infra etc I guess.
Creating all of this is cool, but I don't know, it looks like a gimmick.
The whole argument is: "Every other page I find myself on now has an AI generated click-bait title, shared for rage-clicks all brought-to-you-by-our-sponsors–completely covered wall-to-wall with popup modals, telling me how much they respect my privacy"
Well, you'll still need content outside your friends group. Even with the "Promised LAN" you'll continue having the same experience.
And what for? What are the use cases? Exchange files? Jokes? Chatting? The examples given: "It’s incredible how much network transport and a trusting culture gets you—there’s a 3-node IRC network, exotic hardware to gawk at, radios galore, a NAS storage swap, LAN only email, and even a SIP phone network of “redphones”."
Ok, fun. But you'll still need WhatsApp/Facetime to talk to your mom, the whole internet to search and learn, sometimes social networks to communicate or to get a job, etc etc etc.
Eh, I'm not sure how gimmicky it is. Without knowing how it's used, maybe the use of the network itself is just for fun, and nothing wrong with doing computer stuff for fun!
But the networking chops to set something like this up are super practical. My current project has forced me to go from "i know how to use sockets in serious applications" to "i run GCE instance snapshots unmodified in a kernel-level TAP web of lies with tricky DNS overlaid to migrate complex workloads that can't go down to bare metal instances colocated in weird places". This is a pretty radical shift in perspective for a historical "network stuff, got it" guy like me.
In the words of that guy from the 10x programmer meme video: "cloud edge is a hype!" The cloud is terrible in 2025: arthritic Xeon SKUs no one wants marked up 10000%, FinOps is like a casino that knows the whales need to neither win too much nor lose too much: they have active calls to action when the grift is so insane that they know you'll eventually do the books and churn out forever. The security theatre around IAM and shit is like going to the DMV, it's a whole thing to make an S3 bucket now.
There are bright spots: fly is the perfect tool for a busy admin who needs to keep an eye on a bunch of prompt engineers with docker and confidence, but for the most part?
Going back to bare metal is just a strict upgrade, and once you do that, knowledge like the knowledge these folks have from operating this thing? It becomes a whole new set of superpowers over and above standard out of the box networking. Standard networking is great when it meets your needs, but if it's all you know, you don't realize how big on an appetite your business has for wizard stuff.
Heh, of all arguably-valid definitions of "LAN Party" I think this one is as far away from mine as you can get.
Traditional LAN party: Everyone brings their computers to one place to connect via a LAN, where they play games, swap files, demo stuff to each other, etc.
My LAN party: All my friends come over to my house and use the computers that I have already set up for them. Nobody brings their own. The point is to interact face-to-face, with video games as a catalyst. Swapping files and demos doesn't really happen since nobody brought their own computer. (My house: https://lanparty.house)
The Promised LAN Party: The LAN is extended, virtually, across multiple houses, so that the participants can play games, swap files, and demo stuff without actually leaving home. It's arguably no longer "local" but functionally it enables the same activities as a LAN party, other than the face-to-face interaction part.
I wonder who gets told their definition is "wrong" more. :)
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.
And a real risk of a shattered CRT screen! I remember carting my bougie 17” Viewsonic around in the back of my Hyundai Excel and wondering if it would pick up a crack along the voyage…
CRTs might tougher than we gave them credit for. I once dropped a Sony Trinitron from shoulder height when it hit a low ceiling. Didn't crack. Still worked. (And yes, this was at a LAN party.)
When I was a kid we threw out our old B&W tv. I wanted to smash the CRT but had heard that they could explode so from a distance I fired several .22 bullets at the screen. They had no effect. IIRC the screen wasn't damaged at all? I can hardly believe what I'm writing but it was true
CRTs have to maintain a near-vacuum inside IIRC. So it's probably a matter of safety to make them strong; if they're too delicate and get mishandled, they implode and some hapless consumer gets a face full of glass.
Wouldn't imploding rather than exploding prevent the face full of glass? But I suppose it has to be pretty strong to maintain that vacuum even if they assumed no one ever touched, moved, or got near it.
4K LCD displays can be delicate as well and prone to cracking. I always worry when I am moving one.
Back in the hayday of lan parties in like 1995-1997 my only monitor was a absolute boulder of a 21" viewsonic (this is pre flatscreen or rather pre decent flatscreens, you could get like 15-17s but they were expensive and absolute trash). One night coming home from the bars, half drunk, in an alley my friend and I found an abandoned (maybe..) horizontal-able handtruck. Made the lan party load unload so much better.
In the previous century i visited many lan parties with my absolute beast of a pc case (an old Siemens 4U 19" metal monster where i stuffed an Amd Athlon setup in with a bunch of harddrives) that i got for free from somewhere. Then carried the huge CRT screen and placed it on top of it. It was insane, i was young (and insane), but i got it all dirt cheap. Most people loved it. And even back then repurposing discarded or super cheap hardware for as long as possible for as many functions as possible gave me much joy and saved me a great bunch of money.
If i had to do a "lan party" these days i'd just connect my Steam Deck to some hdmi beamer and play Jackbox games with a bunch of people.
Also 10-base-2 [1] Ethernet where you always had to debug a dodgy terminator.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10BASE2
Or a shitty cable. Or the terminators were missing. Or both. Our rich friend buying a switch was a real life saver.
Token-ring marathon
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.
For my definition, I totally don't care whether the server is local or in the cloud. I have a fast enough internet connection that it won't make a difference. (I mean. I would _like_ servers to be local, but I'm not going to refuse a game just because it uses cloud servers.)
The important thing is only that the players are local.
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 was in high school in the late 90s to early aughts. The school system used Novell NetWare with Windows NT workstations. At the time, their security was lax. In fact, they set up the directory so that by default, every user logged in using the first four letters of their first name coupled with the last four letters of their last name as the username, and the last four digits of their phone number as their password. I realized this also applied to school employees. Most of whom never changed their password. All of whom were local administrators for computers. Some of whom had network administration rights.
I used multiple school officials' accounts to log in, push a copy of UT99, filled with custom maps, to a network share. We would then copy that folder to the hard drive of the school computers and play UT99 on them. We had amazing LAN parties where we would find empty computer labs after school and play games for hours.
They had BNC networking in that building at the time. It took "forever" in my mind to copy the game from the network share to the local hard drive. Totally worth it.
In those days they even let us maintain the high school website using Dreamweaver...
I love these stories!
I was a sophomore in college in '99-00 and they had just brought in new Power Mac G4 machines with ATI Rage 128 16MB AGP cards. They were faster and better than anything I had used to that point and it also was around when Unreal Tournament was released which was a big deal. I was the administrator of this lab and was supposed to oversee students working on video and audio projects. But instead, we had epic UT tournaments and better yet, I got paid to be there. I also had keys to get into the lab so we would catch a buzz and play for hours.
Absolutely amazing times.
My high school computer lab in 1998-99 was full of Windows 98 machines running a program called "Fortress" which was meant to lock it down and prevent tampering.
I made a custom boot disk (floppy) that would boot Windows bypassing Fortress. It was pretty easy.
During computer programming class I'd install Worms on the machine and we'd all play.
The instructor was a cool guy and said it was fine as long as we were getting our work done.
On one of the tests he included a question: "Who is the master of the ninja rope?"
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
This video is great, but it must have been awkward to have Linus narrating about your own house while you sit there. Why not interview Kenton?
Honestly I think interviews are just not something Linus does a lot of. He has a particular workflow where he writes a script for himself and then acts it out for the camera. Changing it up would be going outside his comfort zone and there wasn't a lot of time.
That said there is a "behind the scenes" video where we initially toured him through the house which is a lot more conversational, but it's on their pain subscription service.
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?
You just loaded up your enormous full tower PC and 17 inch CRT monitor in the back of your friend's brother's cousin's friend's station wagon, and made it happen. I had a Rubbermaid tub that I would use to lug the tower and all the necessary cables and accessories. A properly gaming-specced laptop would have been absurdly expensive (they still are) and a bit like cheating anyway.
I had a lanboy? case that came with a carry strap. The case was also mostly aluminum so it was pretty light. Not many people had laptops back then. Managers at work maybe had one. Most people had a proper desktop.
Don’t forget your speakers! Got show off your highly refined collection of mp3s…
Laptops??? There weren't gaming-capable laptops in the 90's, and besides that, the ultimate status symbol at a LAN party was lugging in your 80-pound 20" Sony Trinitron CRT.
I vividly remember the desk holding my 15" Trinitron slowly bending under the load, but I don't know what it would have weighed. I'd imagine that 20" was a bear to get out of the car and make your way inside with.
Similarly, I'm not sure how 13 or 14 year old me got a 27" Trinitron TV downstairs by myself. 34 year old me would need an entire bottle of Advil for sure.
Mate, my pentium 100mhz laptop played quake, carmageddon and nfs with at least 15fps in the 90's~
I did bring my dell craptop with that I scrounged parts from 3 nonworking used business ones together...it had the ATi Mobility 1 (Rage 128?) and could do half life 1 if you really tweaked things or Quake 3.
That aside, it sucked performance wise even with a Pentium 3. My main PC and 19in monitors were what we drug around to LANs all over.
There used to be an old movie theater in North Branch MN that was converted to basically a permanent LAN Party where people would just come and go.
Movies and bands would play on the stage on weekends or something, too. Best time of my life.
This is what I thought which is what confused me - I guess lugging around CRTs just seemed a little much.
I don't live in the US though so perhaps we just missed out on that rite of passage not living somewhere where kids are more likely to have access to a car.
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?
At the time the pictures were taken, we hadn't gotten around to populating the walls much. Now we've hung up a lot of our kids' art, nicely framed. Amusingly a lot of it looks sort of like abstract modern art, like Jackson Pollock or Rothko, enough so to confuse guests. :)
Abstract modern art seems to have some things in common with some kids' art: focus on materials, color, texture, perception; and representational art may focus on symbolism rather than realistic rendering. There's also an authenticity to art that is created for personal expression without worrying what other people will think about it.
It's hard to capture three dimensional physical art in two dimensions and/or digitallly, even more so when the art is abstract. The context and interaction with the physical environment can also be important.
I actually had a similar question / comment but about plants! We have (at least) one in every room in our house and they do wonders for the space.
Not suggesting you go out and buy plants for the gaming rooms (maybe you already have) but wondering if it was a conscious decision not to have any?
Indoor plants are tricky with cats. They will chew on them, and many plants can be poisonous to them. Also keeping them watered is work, and they can create a mess if they grow in the wrong direction.
We have a lot of plants outside, though.
Makes a lot of sense. Mystery solved, thank you :)
Very nice. Well thank you for sharing your house with us, truly aspirational!
It's more like a "VPN party".
Sibling comments here have suggested "WAN party", but that sounds more like one that anyone on the public Internet can join.
If you aren’t using IPX/SPX, it isn’t a real LAN party.
Or there’s true Scotsman all the way down to the turtle.
I fondly remember playing Atomic Bomberman over IPX/SPX with a bunch of people. One of the best LAN party games ever (to me).
Null modem LAN parties!
I recall playing Warcraft I with my friend over null modem. Kind of boutique LAN party.
Do y'all get mosquitos on the roof? My back patio is screened in and some are still sneaking through. Would love to know the wired-ethernet-certainty type of approach to dealing with this.
There are sometimes mosquitoes, but there's usually a pretty nice breeze on the roof which makes it hard for mosquitoes to navigate there.
Hybrid LANs are also pretty good. During the Christmas-New Year break, old school friends would often have a LAN party with ZeroTier or similar set up, so people who couldn't make it could still drop in and out. You'd get a great LAN party vibe from the room full of PCs and ethernet cables everywhere, but you'd also get much higher player counts. Everyone wins.
Hah! OP feels more like a WAN party :P
I think we can welcome virtual LAN parties into the fold, especially post-pandemic. Also games like Diablo 4 have given up on LAN and are WAN-only (though there is couch co-op?) but still fun to play in person, as are MMOs, online team FPS, etc.
Interesting! I grew up before network cards was a thing in home computers (Commodore 64 and Amiga), but a group of my friends organized what we called «meetings» which I would characterize as your traditional LAN party. I remember at some point that we hooked up two Amigas over a fairly long parallel cable and were able to send data across. Cannot recall if we actually were able to copy larger files between them though. Fun times!
To me, one of the defining features of a LAN party is a single broadcast domain. I thought that is what this was, at first, but it is actually an L3 overlay network with DNS and BGP and the whole nine yards. Somewhat a stretch for a LAN. :D
Absolutely. I think while plenty of games now can rely on UDP hole punching or file sharing can be done with centralized cloud storage, part of the earlier LAN appeal was sharing a segment together and all the ease that brought.
OS's like Windows can easily share folders and printers, games (particularly older ones) run LAN discovery off of broadcasts, and the lot. Sure, sometimes you can route it, but when I think LAN, I think back to the wireless bridges in a neighborhood LAN between houses we would setup - ARPs and all, in a big messy broadcast domain that worked well enough.
Today I think I'd reach for GRE tunnels to add that functionality if I was them. Otherwise, this is just the Internet with more steps.
Cool I also live in Austin and I heard of your LAN party house many times, curious though, how often do you LAN?
My definition was close to yours, but the guest computers were bad. Like, an iMac G3 in the year 2012 or some Hackintosh'd ewaste PC.
I think your definition/setup is the wrongest as it does not capture the spirit. You have a cyber café.
It doesn’t capture the spirit of a group of friends getting together to play video games in a shared space? Or there’s a different definition of the LAN party spirit that somehow entirely precludes that aspect?
Like I could understand saying it misses out on the aspect of literally bringing your individual PCs, missing out on the neatness of everyone’s individuality as another commenter pointed out, but I don’t think they’d agree that the in person, gaming in the same place aspect is entirely precluded from “the spirit”
You are trying to deconstruct something, keeping part of it and calling it the same. You seem to be making my argument for me, so I have nothing to add.
I think the spirit is people playing computer games with each other in the same room. I don't think it really matters who owns the computers.
There's a slightly relevant response under "Dragging over your own computers is part of the fun of LAN parties. Why build them in?".
Ah yes, spending an hour getting setup then at least two peoples computers don't boot or the GPU doesn't work...then no one has or installed any of the games you're hosting. Good memories
Then we all stand around and help debug it
A cyber cafe would be full of strangers though.
Only 1 (one) cat picture. This is wrong... :-)
Looks like a nice setup, but ideally the room should be like 25% of that size. Being almost uncomfortably close to each other is a feature :).
People move far away but still want to participate in LAN parties.
your definition is LAN Party with BYOB but not BYOD
Wow, that place must have cost millions to build.
* offer comes with some money-binding requirements
WAN party maybe ?
Jesus fuck.
Obviously, as you predicted, the first reaction is "how do you afford all of that", which is a silly question, because the answer is "just be in the right place in the right moment".
Now, the second question is how do you get to actually organize a big party? My experience is that in modern times it's very difficult to maintain an extensive social network. First, people live far away from each other, so visiting someone becomes a journey. Second, people have shit to do, and when you invite them for a beer it usually means asking them to give up something else in that time (like taking care of their kids). Third, in the age of hyperindividualism it's difficult to meet people you vibe with, because everyone has their own distinct personality and the era of shared values and hobbies seems to be gone.
> My LAN party: All my friends come over to my house and use the computers that I have already set up for them.
I had many computers but not that many. Most friends would bring their own PCs.
Countless hours on Half-Life maps and mods, pre Counter-Strike. Then the Counter-Strike beta came out and that became our (full) life!
We'd also play Warcraft II on our LAN.
Now... Warcraft II wasn't meant to be played over the Internet, so when there was no actual LAN party, we'd simulate a LAN protocol using Kali:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kali_(software)
That allowed us to play Warcraft II with strangers on the Internet.
Wild times!
P.S: my very best LAN that said was a coax cable going through the window directly to my neighbours' house. Brothers in each house made for nice Warcraft II games.
The page contains link to a manifesto/description: https://notes.pault.ag/tpl/
I think that's a more interesting read than the linked page.
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.
> We're using our own non-standard and possibly ill-advised TLD, which is .tpl — short for The Promised LAN.
Not ill advised at all. The internet was never meant to be centralized; more should be done to resist the ICANN hegemony. The replacement for manually swapping host file entries ought to have been something that placed control over identity in the hands of the individual instead of selling it.
True but when ICANN decides .tpl is a new TLD owned by some corporation, what's your next move?
Looks similar to dn42 https://dn42.dev/Home
dn42 is really fun tinkering with, it feels very much like connecting to the real internet.
The set of internal services is growing too.
No description of the games they even play? It's an interesting idea. But it sounds like one big "no girls allowed" kind of treehouse with how minimally forthcoming they are about documentation
> 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.
Where did I say any of that?
I was just bemused at the webpage bragging about hosting a "24/7 LAN party" but then not even mentioning what games they like playing
Idk, probably this part?
> it sounds like one big "no girls allowed" kind of treehouse
"We're going to write paragraphs about how cool this project is but also it's all on the LAN and it's invite-only so don't ask"
Read the manifesto, linked there and in the comments here. Its entire membership is 19 close friends and they won't let anyone new join who hasn't already been friends with one of them for at least 10 years.
They're just sharing the idea because they like what they've built and think other people could have fun building something similar. It's like a treehouse enthusiast putting some pictures of the cool treehouse they've made on their website. It's not an invitation to come and hang out in it.
I'm tempted to make one of these, TBH.
> It's like a treehouse enthusiast putting some pictures of the cool treehouse they've made on their website.
At which point you might (reasonably IMO) complain that you're rather curious what use they find for said treehouse in practice.
I suppose, if you're the sort of person whose response to finding pictures of someone's treehouse on the web is to complain there are no pictures of people playing games in it.
Context is important. If the pictures are captioned "check out this awesome treehouse I built" then yeah I don't expect anything further.
Whereas if they are captioned "this treehouse is my absolute favorite place to hang out" or "everyone should build one of these for themselves" or "building this treehouse saved my relationship" or whatever then I am going to find myself wondering why that might be.
Like if I tell you that Python is just the best language ever and you ought to be using it for approximately everything you do because it will improve your life or society or perhaps even the universe as a whole, might you not wonder _why_ I think that?
I don't know why we're even having this debate, but this thread is in response to someone literally complaining they didn't say what games they play on it (as if they necessarily even do). They've given plenty of technical info about it - certainly more than they're obliged to, which is none - and anyone who would do something like this is going to do it their own way anyway.
I'm clearly in the target audience as I'm now considering doing something like this. The page gives me all the information I need or want.
Probably because I'm in the same camp as the person you originally responded to. It's an intriguing project and clearly a lot of effort has gone into it so I'm left wondering about how it's being used. If I were going to build something similar (as they advocate) what might I use it for?
> around half of the people on the LAN have thermal receipt printers with open access, for printing out quips or jokes on each other’s counters.
> there’s a 3-node IRC network, exotic hardware to gawk at, radios galore, a NAS storage swap, LAN only email, and even a SIP phone network of “redphones”.
The above is from the linked essay about the current sordid state of the internet. It gives a few ideas for fun pastimes but honestly not a lot. Gaming with close friends is probably the majority of what I'd use a LAN setup like this for so naturally I'm left curious what I might be missing out on.
I guess you're not into networking? If so, perhaps what seems obvious to me isn't obvious to you: the network is the toy. Building it is the game. The purpose isn't the things you can do with it, it's how you do them and who you do them with. Two cans and a piece of string is still fun in the age of cellphones, and a treehouse is still fun to be in when you have a nice living room with a telly.
If the idea of setting up one of these doesn't sound like fun in its own right, I wouldn't recommend attempting it.
You could play any game on it. How's that?
Same reason as any other LAN party though. Like, you (average HN user) probably would wonder what's in the treehouse. But show it to a 9 year old and they'll say: fuck yeah, awesome treehouse, I want one. Filling it with activities comes later.
DN42 (https://dn42.network/) is kind of like this but public, mostly used to play with networking technologies though you could also use it to make a virtual LAN party.
Note: If you do, you should probably check the paths your traffic takes and get consent of everyone on the path, since most people expect to mostly pass network-control traffic and some nodes have very limited bandwidth. Fortunately, AS-paths in DN42 are usually quite short. If all your LAN party traffic is confined to your own network then obviously it's not a problem.
If you built one of these you could also connect it to DN42 as-is, being aware more people will be able to access your network if not firewalled.
I don't see how this is any different from someone sharing a homelab setup or something.
“A friend group with an idea to share”
Yeah I was just wondering what they play
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.
What gave you that impression?
> The Promised LAN is a closed, membership only network...
I can't tell what you are trying to add to the conversation here, or of it's just sarcasm.
I was teasing you and the op because you both made hedges ("seems", "sounds") when it was very clearly stated in the very first eight words of the first sentence of the first paragraph on that site.
I've never tried to join, so I don't know how exclusive it is. There are private clubs and groups that you just need to ask and they'll let you join. Others do a lot of vetting. If it's the former, it's not all that private.
You should read the article and the linked manifesto, because they are very clear that it’s none of that.
I already did read the article and I did not get that impression. If it's really that small and private, why mamke a website about it for friends and prospective members? Why architecture the network in a way that favors scaling, including mulitple backbone nodes running diverse software with the option to add more? Clearly these indicate thats it's not that small or exclusive. I would bet that if you were to bump into someone at DEF CON and they were a member, all you'd have to do to join is say "that's so cool, how can I join".
It is as small as it says. BGP/IPSec might be silly at its size, but it was also the path of least resistance given the background of the people in the Bureau of Lan Management. I guess it was also for lolz to see if these things could be made stable and reliable without the big-organization clownery that we constantly run into.
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.
Or, hear me out, it's just a group of nerdy friends that wanted to hack something together.
This is exactly what it is. There's no weird file-sharing stuff going on.
It's a LAN party. Of course there is.
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...
Really want to know the rationale of choosing IPSec over Wireguard. IPSec is really tricky to get right (IMO). Maybe legacy issue?
They probably use L2TP with IPsec to get Layer 2 transit. Doing that over Wireguard would require Gretep or something similar
Not sure they are using l2 transit.
They are using BGP and routing nodes (backbones), recreating a mini IP (layer 3) network I think.
I've used raw wireguard in a p2p fashion to interconnect LANs. I run wireguard on each segment directly inside the network routers.
Just make sure all LANs are using a different subnet. A /24 is standard. Then configure all the peers and you get a fully peer to peer network. No relays. You only need one side of every peer "pair" to be reachable from the internet.
I do have a small management script to help peer discovery (dynamic IPs) and key exchange, but it's not strictly required. With a dozen nodes or so, it's maintainable manually. Wireguard supports roaming natively, as long as one peer can reach the other.
Very little overhead. ICMP, TCP and UDP support.
That is correct. IPSec sucks but we have already paid the price of being forced to figure it out in big organizations, so, not much motivation to figure out another thing.
I have my own Wireguard mesh network between my home network and a couple of VPSes. I configured it all manually, too. I'm basically running a virtual public network and have it routing a /24 (BGP announced at the VPSes) back to my home.
How did you get a public /24?!
I was an early Internet user (early 90's.) They gave them out to anyone who asked back then.
A little morbid, but have you considered setting up a beneficiary for the allocation or detailing this asset in a will? That's some special, virtual real estate you have there.
Oh this make sense. For LAN, one definitely want L2. Totally overlooked the objective.
Why though?
The only use case I can imagine is a legacy game which performs a server search by broadcasting/scanning the local network. And even then - most of the time these games had server browsers.
Some classic games use IPX for multiplayer, so you can't play them over an IP VPN.
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.
This kind of defeats the purpose of TPL. Part of TPL is setting up your own network segment. There's a dashboard that shows who has what working.
Part of the fun of TPL isn't just that your computer can talk to another computer, it's that you have your own setup configured form the ground up so your /24 can talk to other /24s on TPL. I 100% understand some people will not enjoy that and won't find it fun, and that is ok. Some people do enjoy learning new things about setting up infrastructure, and this scratches some of that itch.
Yeah.
I personally ran into the legacy setup issue for running vanilla Wireguard for my setup before Tailscale is a thing and have to manually manage keys, routing and DNS.
But one thing Tailscale has that annoyed me is that they are using 100.64 CGNAT addresses (which is more RFC-compliant) but conflicts with one of my cloud service provider's pre-configured DNS, NTP and software mirrors setup. Using it became more or less messy for this reason.
You can change what IP addresses it uses: https://tailscale.com/kb/1304/ip-pool
Uh Great. They added this feature! It cannot last time (few years ago) I checked.
I can somehow consider migrating now.
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.
I really like this, no feeds, no algorithms, just a network to do cool stuff with like minded people. Things like this are the answer to people complaining about the current state of the Internet. Making a network and getting your friends to use is how it all started.
There are true P2P lans using microwave radios for ham operators https://hamwan.org/
I knew guys who set up something like that in Culver City / West LA. It was slow, but it was self-reliant . Basic email, image transfer etc.
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).
good point on this .
Are there bands where licenses are reasonable? i would be interested to rekindle this sort of network with some friends.
I love this idea, not least of all because it was one of the things on my "todo" pile that never gets any smaller. Congratulations guys. I miss the small community I found on the early Internet, before Eternal September. When small groups of people get together in a space that is both "confined" and "limitless" great things can happen.
This is awesome - I've always fantasized about doing something like this, but Tailscale gets you pretty close without the interesting work.
I think this is the most overkill virtual LAN I've ever heard of. Have y'all considered running your own ISP?
I've been wanting to do this for ages. Originally I wanted to do this at the home router level, but that quickly got shut down when I got a test net up and running and my friends could control the Chromecasts in my house.
For us a "tailscale" equivalent with SoftEther is what we used to manage the DNS/Tunneling for our fileshare/services.
So cool to see more people playing in this space. Please post more! <3
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.
I'm one of the people whose home LAN is completely exposed to TPL. There's an amount of "screwing around" where I wouldn't care. If you want to print an xkcd cartoon to my desk, fine, lol, a minor surprise in my day. If you print 1000 pages of dicks while I'm not home so that my paper and toner run out, that would be uncool. After years of caring about this problem, I came to believe that this kind of normative social contract cannot scale to include "everyone in the entire world," and that this kind of unwritten normative code is the only thing that makes any social space tolerable.
Actually it’s pronounced the promised lawn :)
I would love to learn more about how to set something like this up. I hope this group will consider open-sourcing more tools and instructions for others who hope to follow in their footsteps.
As some other commenters have said, Headscale/Tailscale scratches some of this itch for me. Having individual devices connect directly to an overlay network is fabulous. However, I can never fully control Tailscale the way I wish to, and connecting networks together with it is difficult.
I love this idea and have considered doing something similar with friends for years. It’s cool to see how far they’ve taken it — much bigger than I had envisioned.
My biggest/only concern - which they gloss over, mostly — is security. Combining networks puts added responsibility on every family that joins. What if friend-X’s kid downloads a virus-riddled torrent, which is capable of multiplying across hosts?
Your own hosts/perimeter can always be protected, but there’s a loss of control with this setup.
Maybe I'm missing something important. Is this purely an overlay network on top of regular IP with regular ISPs? Or have the got their own physical layer that I missed during reading? My confusion comes from LAN usually implying physical layer colocation. Otherwise, wouldn't it be a WAN?
The network is made up of independently operated and heterogeneous nodes (currently three nodes, a mix of Debian using strongSwan and OpenBSD using iked), which peer over IPSec links.
It's a VPN connecting sites together to form something like a LAN, but geographically separated. Multinational company "LAN"s are set up in a similar fashion.
Off topic I suppose but in the early 2000s there was a large LAN party / gaming tournament using this name. Several friends drove hours to attend.
https://arstechnica.com/civis/threads/pc-lan-tourneys-if-you...
https://web.archive.org/web/20020605175253/http://www.thepro...
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Submit this to LGR. Maybe he can spearhead a community like this.
Hey. That's my network name.
I find it funny how the manifesto complains about AI so much; meanwhile, my AI-friendly friend group uses these exact kinds of private servers/networks to get away from the hordes of AI haters and harassment on the public Internet.
But I guess that's fine. We can each have our own spaces, and never the twain shall meet.
Isn't this a WAN and not LAN?
Sounds like they just reinvented internet.
Kind of disappointed that "The promised LAN" runs on IPv4. One man's promised LAN is another man's hell.
This sounds really interesting and something I'd be into
no word on how to join though
The idea is to be a space where existing social groups play, rather than a wider community - it's inherently based on a level of pre-existing trust. Writing about it is supposed to be an incentive for people to build their own little spaces where they can share weird stuff that should never be near the public internet - it's cool to have a network of thermal printers that people can submit jokes to, but it only really works if access is somewhat limited.
The SIP "redphones" is an idea I really like. My wife managed to get a SIP IP phone from one of her buy-nothing groups that I've been meaning to setup an Asterisk server for just to mess with. Maybe stick it upstairs where my kid likes to play & let him get the experience of using a "real" phone.
It is pretty funny to be able to dial an extension from your desk phone to get the IVR of paultag's Christmas tree, but man does managing asterisk suck.
>As a result, membership will never be open, and we will never have enough connected LANs to deal with the technical and social problems that start to happen with scale. This is a feature, not a bug.
>This is a call for you to do the same. Build your own LAN. Connect it with friends’ homes. Remember what is missing from your life, and fill it in. Use software you know how to operate and get it running. Build slowly. Build your community. Do it with joy.
From https://notes.pault.ag/tpl/
Read the linked manifesto. I think the idea is to inspire you to set up your own, rather than join this one.
Looks like an internet (not The Internet) to me.
How do TPL and mentioned here dn42 compare to Yggdrasil?
TPL: virtual permanent LAN party, closed group.
DN42: build a second internet to learn how it works. Public, no privacy features.
Yggdrasil: build a next generation Internet with some privacy features, and self-organization without central assignment
Tor/I2P: build a completely private internet, but sacrificing speed and the ability to operate on the base layer. (Yggdrasil and DN42 and TPL can run on individual one-to-one links, but Tor and I2P assume existing any-to-any connectivity on the layer beneath, which means you already need an internet)
What an extremely technical friend group lol.
Yes, everyone is pretty technical. The author of this article (ptag) spends a decent amount of time helping the people out who aren't as well-versed in infrastructure/networking.
I am sad I don’t have 10 friends let alone so many that would be interested in such a thing.
Only useful thing for my friends would maybe have been for gaming but with online these days it’s less necessary.
Wait until governments shut it down due to "piracy"...
I hate when people that don't know anything about this scene make laws. It just kills the fun in them...
IPSec, no IPv6, sad.
Seems like this is a perfect opportunity to throw out all that custom jiggery pokery and just replace it with tailscale/wireguard.
It's not really custom. It's industry standard protocols for connecting independent (one might say "autonomous") networks.
Tailscale is this on easy mode, of course. There's a blog post by apenwarr somewhere that I can't find right now that lays out the fundamental thesis of Tailscale and its very similar to these folks' manifesto.
The custom jiggery pokery is the point. This is like telling someone to throw away their hobby car they work on over the weekends and replace it with a new electric vehicle because it'll, "Just work." The configuring things, understanding the infrastructure, that is _the point_.
Hypothetically, it be possible to achieve the same thing with a shared tailscale network, right? But can you kinda "federate" tailnets like this? So independent tailnets owned and run by individuals, but networked together into an inter-tailnet?
You miss the fun and games of running your own DNS infra etc I guess.
This is one of those cases where the work is the fun. It just depends on your personal definition of ‘work’ and ‘fun’.
Creating all of this is cool, but I don't know, it looks like a gimmick.
The whole argument is: "Every other page I find myself on now has an AI generated click-bait title, shared for rage-clicks all brought-to-you-by-our-sponsors–completely covered wall-to-wall with popup modals, telling me how much they respect my privacy"
Well, you'll still need content outside your friends group. Even with the "Promised LAN" you'll continue having the same experience.
And what for? What are the use cases? Exchange files? Jokes? Chatting? The examples given: "It’s incredible how much network transport and a trusting culture gets you—there’s a 3-node IRC network, exotic hardware to gawk at, radios galore, a NAS storage swap, LAN only email, and even a SIP phone network of “redphones”."
Ok, fun. But you'll still need WhatsApp/Facetime to talk to your mom, the whole internet to search and learn, sometimes social networks to communicate or to get a job, etc etc etc.
Eh, I'm not sure how gimmicky it is. Without knowing how it's used, maybe the use of the network itself is just for fun, and nothing wrong with doing computer stuff for fun!
But the networking chops to set something like this up are super practical. My current project has forced me to go from "i know how to use sockets in serious applications" to "i run GCE instance snapshots unmodified in a kernel-level TAP web of lies with tricky DNS overlaid to migrate complex workloads that can't go down to bare metal instances colocated in weird places". This is a pretty radical shift in perspective for a historical "network stuff, got it" guy like me.
In the words of that guy from the 10x programmer meme video: "cloud edge is a hype!" The cloud is terrible in 2025: arthritic Xeon SKUs no one wants marked up 10000%, FinOps is like a casino that knows the whales need to neither win too much nor lose too much: they have active calls to action when the grift is so insane that they know you'll eventually do the books and churn out forever. The security theatre around IAM and shit is like going to the DMV, it's a whole thing to make an S3 bucket now.
There are bright spots: fly is the perfect tool for a busy admin who needs to keep an eye on a bunch of prompt engineers with docker and confidence, but for the most part?
Going back to bare metal is just a strict upgrade, and once you do that, knowledge like the knowledge these folks have from operating this thing? It becomes a whole new set of superpowers over and above standard out of the box networking. Standard networking is great when it meets your needs, but if it's all you know, you don't realize how big on an appetite your business has for wizard stuff.