Event: Sonoma State LAN 01 Event Date: 10/23/03 Written By: Warhawk Date Written: 11/03/03

Since I arrived here at Sonoma State I have been anxious to meet other fellow gamers. Unfortunately, being a school of about 75% girls, the gamer population here is a bit thin. When club day came around, I was excited to discover that somone was starting a gaming club, and planned to host a LAN on campus.

Unfortunately, after talking with the organizer, I discovered that the favored game amoung SSU gamers was the dreaded CS. It was clear that I would have to attend this LAN and bring the Mowers gospel to them, and help them to turn from their CS ways, and show them the light of newer and better games.

After further talks with the event organizer, I discovered that the gaming club had yet to secure any networking equipment. This was a job for the Mowers Clan! I quickly offered my services and the services of my two 24 port 3com switches. I also enlisted the help of FAngel, who loaned two more switches and a humongus bucket of CAT 5 cables. These turned out to be crucial to the LAN, and FAngel became the hero of the SSU LAN even though he never came to it.

The LAN staff's jaws dropped as I lugged in the massive amounts of equipment, and they were impressed yet again, when Kraz arrived with his Uber Rackmount Server with 50 gigs of filesharing goodness. It was clear that Kraz and I were definately the LAN verterans amoung this group, as most of them were painfully new to a lot of LAN protocol, that most of us take for granted.

The staff did a good job of preparing for this, by printing out nice instruction sheets on how to use virtual drive software, and mount images and the like. They also were kept busy troubleshooting various problems with getting CS to work on some of the jerry computer systems that people brought. Speaking of Jerry computer setups, there were quite a few, including serveral HPs and Compaqs that were barely powerful enough to run CS ... which explains why CS was so popular.

Kraz and I were somewhat succeful in spreading the Mowers anti-CS gospel, as some LAN participants eventually switched to playing Halo. Unfortunately we werent able to get anyone to play much more than that, as our efforts to spread Rune were unsucceful. Perhaps if we had more Mowers there it would have been easier.

The big downsides to the LAN were the lack of internet connection, and of course the abundance of CS players, and general newbieness. These were not party killers luckly, and Kraz and I had a good time. On the upside, the LAN staff was very friendly and generally were a good bunch of guys, who I thoughly enjoyed meeting and gaming with. One of the biggest upsides to the lan was the fact that it was FREE!

Yes, thats right, FREE. It's really hard to critizise a FREE event, so im going to say, in all, the LAN was a success, and I would like to think that a good portion of that success can be attributable to contributions by the Mowers. Thanks to FAngel and his gear, because without it, there would have been no lan, and thanks to Kraz for making the trek out to SSU to game with me, and represent the Mowers.

ADDENDUM - 01/23/2026 By Warhawk

These LANs were super basic, and most of the people that came were not dedicated gamers, and had pretty basic machines. I always hoped this would grow and that we could show everyone what real LANing was like. Unfortunately it would not be; CS and the (really bad) PC port of Halo would be mainstays at these events.

I remember doing at least one more of these, but I dont seem to have any pictures or records of them.