Latest posts

LAN-Party network upgrades

Author: Lasse - 2023-06-02

It's been a while since I wrote about upgrades to the LAN-party network. Things have changed! I also feel like this could get out of hand quickly if I don't be aware of the possibility. ;)

Blog update

Author: Lasse - 2023-06-01

I switched from zola to another static site generator and changed where the blog is hosted.

The blog is back

Author: Lasse - 2022-11-13

The blog is back! I had a bit of a pause there when my blog was offline for some time. This is just my announcement that it's back now.

Kubernetes is overkill for a blog

Author: Lasse - 2022-11-13

If you'd say that setting up a Kubernetes cluster for a simple blog is a bit overkill, you'd be right! But that doesn't stop me. This is how I'm learning to use these things.

I have been using Kubernetes at work for our game backend infrastructure, and it's awesome. The major point for me to run my own cluster is to learn new things. And this blog is not the only thing I'm hosting on my cluster.

But let's talk about setting up the cluster with [Terraform](https://www.terraform.io/) and hosting the blog now.

Setting up a reverse proxy to aid server development

Author: Lasse - 2021-08-22

There are different use-cases for this. Mine was that I have a monolith server which I want to split up for a rewrite, but I did not want to rewrite it all by once. Instead I want to do it piece-by-piece so that I can have both servers running at once while doing the transition.

LAN party cache server

Author: Lasse - 2021-07-04

If you have multiple people downloading the same games from steam, origin, blizzard launcher, and others, and if you have fairly slow internet speed you could probably benefit from a cache server. Here's how I set up mine on my [upgraded LAN server](/posts/upgrade-lan-server-bandiwdth/) using Docker and [LAN Cache](http://lancache.net/).

Upgrade your LAN server bandwidth

Author: Lasse - 2021-07-03

I'm going to a LAN party with my friends, and last year we had some problems with our LAN bandwidth. We had an old 1gbps network switch with switching capability of 2gbps, which means only two people can talk to each other at 1gbps at once. The second problem was that because the switch was so old and someone had an older Cat5 cable instead of a Cat5e cable the switch decided to make the whole network run at 100mbps. In the current day where games are generally at least several gigabytes if not tens of gigabytes, that is not a very good experience to be had. These are the steps I did to improve our next LAN party in about a month's time.

Also please note I'm not a network professional even though I have a basic surface-scratching networking engineering training. Someone might have a lot to say about my solutions here but ehh. It sure works for our LAN party I guess.

How I optimized nodejs docker container builds

Author: Lasse - 2021-07-01

I was debugging a problem that only existed when the server was running in the cluster. That meant that I changed the code, waited a whooping 10-15 minutes to see if the change worked or not or to see the extra logging I had added. What a waste of time. This is how I managed to get that build time to only about 5 minutes.

Advantages of sharing code between client and server

Author: Lasse - 2021-06-27

When a game client and server communicate they need to be able to talk to each other in a common language. This means both ends need to have common knowledge about the data that is transferred in-between. In general projects choose different back-end programming languages because some people prefer those languages over the ones that have to be used to develop the client project, or they may be accustomed to develop the server in certain languages instead of others. Here I will go through why I think it is better to have a shared codebase and compare the advantages and disadvantages of different approaches.

Hello, World!

Author: Lasse - 2021-06-26

Once again I decided to start writing a blog. I have tried that hobby before, but for a reason or another I have always stopped being interested in it. This time I'm going to try a new approach: planning ahead! So yes, I have written down a lot of different topics I'd like to write about, and planned a sort of a schedule around that. Let's see how it goes this time.