I’ve setup a VPN recently, and I created a large bridged VPN. I had a little problem though – the DHCP server from the remote network was leaking through to mine, causing all sorts of troubles, as my network devices were trying to use the remote router, which I had of course blocked VPN access to the Internet.

So, lets take a hypothetical network:

* eth0: Internet Connection (192.168.0.2)
* eth1: LAN Connection
* tap0: VPN Connection
* br0: Bridge between eth1 and tap0 (10.0.1.1)

Now, your local DHCP server is saying the subnet is 10.0.0.0/8, and it gives out IPs in the range 10.0.1.100 – 10.0.1.200. The remote end (10.0.2.1) gives out 10.0.2.100 – 10.0.2.200, and sets the routing accordingly. I found running the DHCP server on the bridge was a problem, particulary with the ISC DHCP server, as it uses raw sockets, thus making it quite hard to try and firewall out. The solution?

Set an IP for eth1 locally (and remotely), that is in the range, say 10.254.1.254, with the netmask 255.255.255.252. Bind your DHCP server (in /etc/default/dhcp3-server) to eth1. Then restart the DHCP servers, and voila. The DHCP servers only give out addresses locally. To your clients it will appear that 10.254.1.254 is giving out IP addresses.

I just tried to do something really simple – create a new NTFS partition on my laptop in the ~4GB of unpartitioned space on it. Unfortunately that is too complicated for Windows, and so it wipes out the root of my Linux partition while it’s at it. Yay, now I get to do two OS installs instead of just one.

Windows x64 is still a pain in the butt, programs rarely exit cleanly if they are more complex than a web browser. Games randomly reboot the machine during play. What the hell, why can a program like that be able to do that? Isn’t that what all this data execution prevention crap is all about?

I don’t know how Windows users put up with this.

This is a fix I’m using to patch World of Warcraft to version 1.5.0, US English version. I found it on the forums, I can’t remember the exact location, though these are all my own words. The fact of the matter is that I’m fed up with their completely unhelpful technical support, and this way seems to be a really fast way to do a reinstall without loosing your settings or having to go through four CDs and taking three hours to install.

Step One: Revert to a 1.0.0 Patch State

This is easy to do. Move Data/Patch.MPQ and wow-patch.mpq to another folder, such as your desktop. Then grab the WoW Repair Utility, and run it. There will be a warning telling you that your WoW install will need to be reverted to an older version. Click yes, and leave the checker to run in the background.

Step Two: Download the 1.5.0 Patch.

The Blizzard downloader is a really simple (to the point of bad) BitTorrent client. To get the patch, and not have to run that downloader or the Blizzard Updater (probably you’re still running
the repair utility at this point), I’m suggesting you run another BitTorrent client to do the download. Blizzard don’t officially supply users with the torrents, however a guild called Nomadic Tendancies have extracted the torrent from the downloader. Download this in your favourite client. You can verify that it is official because the tracker should be http://us.tracker.worldofwarcraft.com:3724/announce. Now that the tracker is up, your download should run smoothly, and in the case of ADSL connections, if you’re using a properly configured client it won’t saturate your uplink to the point you can’t download anything.

Screenshot of downloading the 1.5.0 patch in Azureus on WinXP, using Blizzard’s tracker. The speeds are rather good for me, so you may go faster (or slower!)

Step Three: Patch and Run!

Wait for the download to finish, and the repair utility to finish. Then run the patch file. If all went well, the patch should have completed correctly. When you click OK on the patch success dialog, WoW will automatically run. If you use a UI modification such as Cosmos, close WoW then run it’s executable first before running WoW again to allow it to patch your Interface files again. At the time of writing, Thottbot is running very slowly, so Cosmos may
time out and fail to upload any presently cached data.

Should problems arise…

I can’t really be liable for them – this is a “might work” fix, and I apologize if I’ve made things worse for you. Try moving the patch.MPQ and wow-patch.mpq files back to their original location. If you still have problems, try contacting Technical Support, and also try a complete reinstall.