LAN Party with PiVPN

Private Networking Club

Article from Issue 304/2026
Author(s):

With PiVPN, a system administrator can build a small private network and let end users attach to it themselves – and use it for running games.

I have a reputation as a moody loner who spends more time with horses and computers than with people. In reality, people who think such a thing of me would be surprised to know I host a weekly retro gaming party every Friday, in which soft drinks, junk food, and old video games are the protagonists. LAN (local area network) parties – events in which nerds meet at a location to play multiplayer games within a local network – may be out of fashion, but they are as fun as ever.

The problem with LAN parties is that people need to attend physically for them to be real LAN parties, which means that if the group cannot meet on a given day, there is no party. Life has a tendency to get in the way of fun, and sometimes there just aren't enough people available. How do you run a LAN party if all the players are out of town?

An obvious solution would be to play online games over the Internet and talk over some voice chat service. This would be workable except for the fact that the games we prefer don't have active Internet multiplayer support: Either multiplayer servers are gone or the games can't establish connections using modern protocols. In order to play online, the person hosting the party would need to place a game server on the Internet, ensure it is Internet reachable, and have players connect to it. Considering the age of the software involved, that would be a bad idea.

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