Incident Report: LAN Party Connectivity Issues
Problem Identification During the event, I noticed a significant drop in performance across the main gaming VLAN. After checking the core switch logs, I immediately identified a broadcast storm caused by a loop in one of the user rows. I didn’t need any extra info from the user side; the high CPU usage on the gateway and the packet drops made the root cause obvious.
Technical Justification I decided to enable Storm Control and BPDU Guard on all access ports instead of just rebooting the hardware. I chose this because it’s a much more robust way to handle high-density environments like a LAN Party. It prevents one bad connection from taking down the whole network, which is essential for scalability and keeping the latency low for the tournament. It’s simply the industry standard for avoiding technical debt in these scenarios.
Resolution Once the protocols were active, the jitter disappeared and the network stabilized. I ran a quick ping test to the local servers to confirm everything was back to normal before closing the ticket.