How to play World of Warcraft on a Mac with a 3G internet connection from 3

When I moved to Dublin I initially had huge difficulties getting internet. Apparently people over here aren’t really using the internet all that much – and the prices are crazy. After almost a month of siphoning open wireless networks I got wireless “broad”band from 3. There are numerous problems with this “broad”band connection, but the most glaring one is that World of Warcraft (WoW) crashes when clicking “Connect” from the splash screen. 

 

The problem is a classic one, DNS trouble. I don’t know how anyone, let alone a multi-international company can fuck this up, but hey, you got to hand it to them. The fix is rather easy however:

 

The European World of Warcraft login server is: eu.logon.worldofwarcraft.com. 

By doing a traceroute: 

$traceroute eu.logon.worldofwarcraft.com 
traceroute to eu.logon.worldofwarcraft.com (80.239.178.109), 64 hops max, 40 byte packets 
… 

 
You get the IP address of the server: 80.239.178.109. 
By adding this IP address to the /etc/hosts file you don’t have to do a DNS lookup when you play the game (if you are not familiar with the command line I suggest you backup the hosts file before messing too much around):

$sudo nano /etc/hosts 
## 
# Host Database 
# 
# localhost is used to configure the loopback interface 
# when the system is booting.  Do not change this entry. 
## 
127.0.0.1              localhost 
255.255.255.255    broadcasthost 
::1                        localhost 
fe80::1%lo0          localhost 
80.239.178.109     eu.logon.worldofwarcraft.com 

 

With the last line added to the hosts file, save the file and start World of Warcraft – you should now be able to play. Enjoy