How can I play SMP when minecraft.net is down?

Since minecraft.net is down or at least badly reachable, is it possible to play multiplayer offline? I know I can log in as one "Player" with the server setting online-mode=false, but the second offline player connecting kicks the first one because of the identical name.

Can this be circumvented?

(As Tyr comments, renaming the first connected player (or the second before connecting) would probably do the trick.)

Solution 1:

The way to do this, is to have a server. Have the server set "online-mode" in it's server.properties file to false. Then start the minecraft client without authenticating it.

You can do that via typing this into "run" on Windows:

java -Xms512m -Xmx1024m -cp "%APPDATA%\.minecraft\bin\*" -Djava.library.path="%APPDATA%\.minecraft\bin\natives" net.minecraft.client.Minecraft "yournamegoeshere"

Or on an Apple Mac, open "Terminal" and enter:

java -Xms512m -Xmx1024m -cp "$HOME/Library/Application Support/minecraft/bin/*" -Djava.library.path="$HOME/Library/Application Support/minecraft/bin/natives" net.minecraft.client.Minecraft "yournamegoeshere"

The only downside of this is that anyone can log in with any name. But the upside is you do not need any third party programs, many of which are illegal.

Solution 2:

A strategy we have used before is to build your own authentication server (the protocol is available) and run that when minecraft.net is down.

You do ofcourse need to have a dabatase with usernames/passwords for this to work, and you would have to place a record in the hosts file whitch will point minecraft.net to the new authentication server.