Hamachi and UDP Broadcast Games

I was recently trying to play some old game (Starcraft, Warcraft 3, and others) in LAN with some friends through the hamachi VPN system. All attempts were unsucessful due to the fact that the broadcasted UDP packet weren’t sent over the VPN interface but only in the local LAN.

To solve this we just had to manipulate the routing table of the systems.
After connecting to the hamachi VPN just do these commands as root user

OS X: as long hamachi uses 5.x.x.x for his nodes
route add -net 255.255.255.255 5.255.255.255

Linux: where ham0 is the hamachi interface
route add -net 255.255.255.255 netmask 255.255.255.255 dev ham0
No, this is not working, i tried to test it and to work around it but found no solution to host on a linux machine by now. If anybody knows how to do so, let me know

It seems to be working on gentoo (look at the comments)

This will redirect all the broadcast packets, maybe it can interfere with some other program, but as long as you want some time off to play it works great. To clear the modification to the routing table we didn’t do anything else then disconnecting from the hamachi VPN, the system handles the disappareance of the interface removing every involved route.

Resuming*

Game	Linux	MacOS
Warcraft 3	play	host
Starcraft	host	host
Delta Force	host	untested

* Linux has no other setup then just starting hamachi. This all was tested between a Mac and a Linux systems

If someone can test other games and maybe help on the linux problem that would be great.

Hope this helps!
[last update 10 August 2009]

Convert Man pages to PDF

Always wanted to watch a man page in a pdf file? It is clearly needed sometimes, especially on mac, since it is the easiest way i know to print a man page or to read it not from a terminal.

The problem is solved easily for both Mac OS and linux. I had to add control for <code>pstopdf</code> too, since on mac it is called that way and has different parameters (but you may have <code>ps2pdf</code> installed with macports anyway).

#! /bin/bash

if [ $# -eq 1 ] ; then
    to_pdf=$(which ps2pdf)
    if [ -z "$to_pdf" ] ; then
        to_pdf=$(which pstopdf)
    fi

    name="$1"
    case "$to_pdf"  in
        *pstopdf) man -t "$name" | "$to_pdf" -i -o "$fname.pdf" ;;
        *ps2pdf)  man -t "$name" | "$to_pdf" - "$name.pdf" ;;
        *)        man -t "$name" > "$fname.ps"
    esac
    exit $?
fi
echo "Wrong number of parameters"
exit 1

Just call it like man2pdf gcc and you’ll get gcc.pdf