I don't think I've told the story here on how I ended up managing the network side on a local LAN party. It was a doozy.
So, I was 16 (I think), and me and some friends had booked some spots at a local LAN party, now on its third year. Rented out venue, you could buy snacks, so on.
By midnight, the network started performing really bad, but in a weird way - I got packet loss to my friend sitting right next to me, and I wasn't alone. You could see that people were getting annoyed.
Well, as a teenager with no boundaries, and a dangerous interest in network security, I wasn't going to let this stand.
The issue was obvious once I opened Wireshark, and saw the amount of traffic coming to my machine - see, they mostly relied on donated equipment, which happened to be 24-port *hubs*. If you don't know what that means, it means that everyone's traffic was going to everyone, and network cards were just giving up under the load.
Another thing was clear from Wireshark - the issue was that someone was torrenting something, and I had their MAC address.
At this point, I flagged down one of the staff, and explained the issue quickly. A quick discussion between them later, and I was given permission to knock them offline (I did some ARP poisoning) and an offer to join up as the "networking guy", which I accepted.
I never got to use it because it shut down before it was done, but I wrote some software that listened for Torrent peer exchange broadcasts, requested the metadata, and then proceeded to read it out over the speaker, like "Seat 4A is currently downloading Godfather-2005-XviD, shame on them!" to let people know who to complain to if the network got bogged down, lol
I forgot to mention - when we finally got rid of those 24-port hubs, I used one for archery practice. Felt nice.
For next year, we bought a couple small unmanaged switches. Had to keep the hubs, but they were connected to switches, so we didn't have any more packet storms.
I eventually added pfSense with a captive portal, where you'd get a voucher with your ticket, so we could connect MAC addresses to people. Used it twice, both times to tell people to stop torrenting shit.