Neverwinter nights

[thyno]

As I was browsing around the forums looking for the workaround for private server I found many suggestions but never a definate working solution. The windows hosts file entries may have worked previously, but I just installed and patched to 1.66.8074 and it doesn't work, or at least only partly.
HEX-ing the executable probably works as suggested in another forum post, but then I'd have to distribute the exe to people, which is quite unnecessary.
My experience has seemed to yeild that nwmain and nwserver have hard-coded IPs(can't verify this, I honestly didn't take the time to check the exe itself), because the hosts file entry of nwmaster.bioware.com works for logging into the multiplayer but then when someone attempts to join the server it attempts to send packets to nwmaster.bioware.com but uses IPs(209.5.183.137 & 66.244.193.9) instead of the domain name, which is why only using the Windows hosts file may or may not work for you.
So a good firewall is pretty much all you need.. deny all traffic you are unsure of while friends are connecting, or just make some rules denying traffic to either of the above mentioned IPs.