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World of Warcraft ports needed to play via VPN?

Here's the deal. I'm currently at the University of Stirling behing a VPN which is blocking the ports I need to play World of Warcraft. I have a macintosh... a G4 Powerbook that is setup (by the university's system) to connect to their VPN in order to reach the internet. Now I'm not a complete noob with this stuff... just for macs. This is what I want to know. I've heard of httptunnel and programs like it being used to play World of Warcraft through VPNs with pcs. I want to know how to do it with a macintosh. Basically I want to play WoW and I don't know exactly how to do it. If you need more info concerning the VPN please let me know.


Dave's Answer:

Another fan of World of Warcraft. I totally understand! :-)

However, as with any other Internet game, World of Warcraft requires that you have specific communications channels -- or 'ports' -- open on your system or firewall for the game to be able to communicate back with the WoW servers.

World of Warcraft uses a range of ports, but the most important is TCP on port 3724.

The Blizzard Downloader is used by the software to download patches to the game, and that uses a much more complex configuration: TCP port 6112 and all ports in the range 6881-6999.

For walkthroughs on router and firewall configuration you should check out the Networking Help for the Blizzard Downloader page.

To open up your Mac firewall, you'll want to choose Sharing from the Apple --> System Configuration... then you can tweak the Firewall settings to allow these ports.

But that's not what you're facing: you have a VPN set up from your university, and you need to figure out how to reconfigure that to work with World of Warcraft. Unfortunately though, even if you can configure your end of the VPN to support these specific ports, the other end of the VPN that interfaces with the Internet would need to allow these specific ports too, which you probably cannot change.

There are some interesting ideas online about how you might circumvent things, however. Check out Playing games over blocked ports. Also make sure you have the very latest version of the World of Warcraft software too.

Hope that helps you with some good ideas: perhaps someone else can also add their own suggestions about how you might get back into the game through your school connection.


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Categorized: Computer and Internet Basics   (Article 6529, Written by )
Tagged: firewall configuration, vpn, world of warcraft, wow
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Reader Comments To Date: 2

Alec said, on August 20, 2007 4:17 AM:

I am a noob with with sort of thing and was wondring if you could point me in the right direction or show me how this could be done on a pc not a Mac?

Thank you

Farid said, on September 24, 2008 8:40 AM:

Can we set up a VPN server from (home - family's house) and cocnnet to that.

Would it work then?

Starbucks coffee cup I do have a lot to say, and questions of my own for that matter, but first I'd like to say thank you, Dave, for all your helpful information by buying you a cup of coffee!

I do have a comment, now that you mention it!











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