Every now and then I have encountered problems with people complaining that they get a cdkey authorization error. And they have a purchased version of quake. This was very annoying, we had a game scheduled but 1/2 of people cant join. CD key authorization in quake works like this. the client connects to the server and sends the key (probably encrypted) the server then takes the key and sends it to quake authorization server (you can see this in the quake server log when people connect. something like "resolved authorize.quake3arena.com to ..."). I came up with a very simple yet effective workaround for this problem. By rerouting authorize.quake3arena.com into the abyss. This can be done very simply in windows and linux (maybe osx as well?). There is this file called hosts (linux: /etc/hosts WIN2K: /WINNT/system32/drivers/etc/hosts run a search if you cant find it.) In this file you can map domainname/hostnames to different IP's
No what we need to do is to add a line to route authorize.quake3arena.com to youself. Find you local IP (in linux run ifconfig in console in windows run ipconfig in terminal)[if you dont know your ip/how to get it just use 127.0.0.1 or something, although this might not work.]
[your local IP] authorize.quake3arena.com
or
127.0.0.1 authorize.quake3arena.com
Note: this site is plaigued with typoes and gramatical errors, please look past that and indulge yourself with the message of the content instead.