Contact
If you have any comments or questions, I can be contacted via eMail atwow@wirebrain.de or in-game as Nebshar on Stormrage and at the whois-entry, if you are so inclined. 4
Glossary & Further Info
- Checksums
- You can check the integrity of a file by comparing its checksum to a known good value. This can be
done for various reasons; one is to verify that your download did not get corrupted and is complete.
Another is to compare it with officially published ones (for instance, by Blizzard Europe/China) to
make sure you are indeed getting a pristine patch file, and not any malicious code.
A trivial way to check whether you have the genuine file is to run the Blizzard Downloader after placing the file in the WoW directory; it will check to see whether the file is complete and genuine. If it is not, it will try to start downloading the broken parts -- if it is, the downloader will quit.
There are also tools available to check the sums provided on this site; a popular one for MD5 checksums is MD5Summer. If you speak Chinese, you can get one provided by Blizzard on wowchina.com.
This site provides MD5, SHA1, Tiger, and CRC32 checksums for all files hosted; follow the checksum link for a file to get all of them (the value in the table is a CRC32 sum). - CoDeeN Content Distribution Network
- Some large files will be accessed through the CoDeeN Coblitz CDN. This should make it possible to get the big patch files speedily, as well.
- Coral Content Distribution Network
- In case the mirror gets overloaded with too many transfers (which sometimes happens on patch days),
clients will automatically be redirected to the Coral Content
Distribution Network link for the same file. If this works, you will still get the file and be none
the wiser for it; if it does not, you will be automatically directed back here and receive an error
message (more specifically a 503 error due to too many users). This should happen only very rarely.
The upshot of all this is that this mirror can potentially support many thousands of concurrent downloads on patch days, with the help of CDN. - Download Links
- Download links on this site lead directly to the corresponding download, unless otherwise noted. There is a limit on how many people can download from here at the same time; if that limit is exceeded, no more connections to the downloads will be allowed until somebody else finishes. If the limit is reached, you will receive a 503 error message. You can keep retrying the same page until you get a spot, get redirected to CDN, wait until interest has died down a bit, use the BitTorrent links, or use another mirror. There are no further limits placed here; if the server is not at capacity, you should be able to download these files at the fastest speed your connection can muster. Even when the server is at capacity, you should still get decent speeds. There are multiple mirror locations, and more can be added if the need arises.
- File Integrity
- All files on this site have been checked for viruses and trojans using ClamAV. Every effort has been made to ensure the files' integrity before it being placed on this webpage. Where official checksums are available (currently for the European and Chinese versions of the patches), they have been checked (and I encourage you to do the same). The source of the files, unless otherwise noted, are the official Blizzard downloaders.
- File Sizes
- File sizes on this site are given in scientific notation (i.e. Kibibytes, Mebibytes, etc.). If you want to learn more about the rationale behind this naming, I encourage you to check out the NIST Reference on the topic. Even if you don't do that, they are probably what you would expect them to be ;-)
- Mirrors
- For some files, further mirrors are available from various hosting services. If the load on the local
servers is too high (or you simply prefer those services), you can obtain the file from there. The icons
signify which service the link leads to;
stands
for MacGameFiles, 
for
MegaUpload.com, 
for FileFront, 
will get you
to a mirror at Rapidshare.com, 
directs you to Hotfile.com, and 
gets
you to the FilePlay page of that file. Larger downloads may be split into
pieces for these; you may need WinRAR or another program capable
of extracting RAR archives if you download those from there. - Mo'PaQ (MPQ)
- Blizzard uses a special file format for their game content and patches called MPQ (short for Mo'PaQ, which is short for Mike O'Brien PAQ). The BNUpdate.exe (or Blizzard Updater.exe) program knows how to apply patches using patches in this format and should be available in your World of Warcraft directory (but is also available from here).
- Operating System
- There are different operating systems World of Warcraft runs on. Patches are made available for the Microsoft Windows (2000, XP, 2003, Vista) and Apple Mac OS X versions of the game.
- Patchnotes
- Blizzard provides Patch Notes for every content patch of World of Warcraft. These are available in all languages World of Warcraft is localized in (currently Korean, English, French, German, Simplified Chinese, and Traditional Chinese). There are often changes between the Test Realm patch notes and the final versions; where possible, the exact differences are also made available for your perusal on this site.
- Public Test Realm
- The Public Test Realm phase for new content patches usually starts several weeks before the final patch is released. To avoid problems installing these, please delete the "WoWTest"- and "wow-patch"-subfolders of your World of Warcraft folder prior to installing a new major version of the PTR client. (You cannot update from an older PTR to a newer one (i.e. 0.11 -> 0.12 is not possible).
- RSS
- A RSS feed is available for this page; it will be updated whenever a new content patch or PTR patch cycle are released.
- Torrent
- Torrents are BitTorrent files describing the contents of a package to your computer and which
computer to ask where to get those contents. The Blizzard Downloader uses a
BitTorrent engine to obtain
its patches; the linked torrents are the same as used by the Blizzard Downloader,
unless otherwise noted (they have been copied from them verbatim).
This lets you use your favourite BitTorrent client instead of the Blizzard Downloader. While this site is primarily a direct download mirror site, when it becomes overloaded or is too slow for you, these may be the way out.
Stats
There are currently 80 downloadable files (in 47.03 GiB) on this
site.
The currently used bandwidth can be seen on this server's main page (but
may include traffic unrelated to this page).
