Trying to play an Internet Game

Yesterday me and a friend were pretty bored and we want to play an online game. We installed warcraft3 and were anxious to start….but..nooooo we couldn’t.
We r both sitting at our homes behind dsl lines (and of course behind nat) and we couldn’t play because there was no internet game option inside the game…apart an option to play on battle.net. I thought that there should be another way to do it. I started googling and found out that I had to setup my own battle.net server called bnetd. (During this time I was uploading the latest patch I had for warcraft (ver 1.12) so that my friend would have the same version with me. ) But bnetd was no longer available because blizzard sued the creators.
What now ? keep searching. I came up with another battle.net replacement called pvpgn. Latest stable ver was 1.6.6. I downloaded, read the configs, downloaded a loader for the warcraft3 client it needs and started it. Server was up but I couldn’t connect my warcraft to it. After some googling I came up with the Battlenet Gateway Editor. I changed my battle.net server settings and now I could log in to my battle.net server and create a new account. But still I could not play…That’s the part where one goes crazy…
Googling and googling I found out that there’s another, newer, official patch (ver 1.17). I started downloading…it was “just” 35Mb…After it was finished…I applied it…but then I needed a no-cd crack. After some swearing and googling I’ve found that too. So now I had warcraft3 ver1.17, a no-cd patch for it and a loader to be able to connect to pvpgn. Still I could connect to server and create an account but I could not login and play.
Googling and searching inside forums I found out that there’s a newer pvpgn version (1.7.3). I got that version and it’s supporting files and fired up the server once again. FINALLY I could create an account and log in to the server.
Then I had to explain all these to my friend. I’ve spent more than 2 hours searching google and downloading various software just because I did not know the name of the battle.net server (pvpgn) and because I had bumped to a semi-official mirror with older version of the files I needed.

(Then we had to configure our NAT rules for the dsl modems in order to be able to connect to each other)

How hard can it be to have some fun ? AND I DON’T WANT TO STICK WITH NETRIS for the rest of my life!

Usefull links:
PvPGN
PvPGN Files to Download
ver 1.17 crack and loader