Banishing Users and Sites At times it may be desirable to disallow a certain internet site access to the mud, due to either a rowdy user or system administrator request. This is done in two ways, depending on the type of ban you wish to impose. The file /adm/etc/access.allow is used for limiting accesses from named or partially named sites by number of logins and/or the (local) time of day. The banish daemon and associated commands in /cmds/adm/_nuke.c and /cmds/adm/_banish.c are used to limit sites to admin-created characters only and for the disallowing of certain name constructs if self-creation has been enabled. In breakdown: The /adm/etc/access.allow file: Any entry in this file has 6 parts all seperated by commas. The first part is the IP address of the site being affected (eg 128.138.129.2 is an example of an IP). You can allow address entire subnets by using a * as a wildcard. The number 128.138.*.* will affect every machine on the 128.138 net. The next field is the class. This can be any positive number. It is best to have a seperate class for each entry in the file. The last three fields are probably the most important. The first of these is the maximum number of users allowed. If this number is 0, no users are allowed. If it is -1, then no limit is enforced. The next two fields represent the beginning time and ending time the record is in affect. These numbers should be represented in 24-hour format, ie 8 = 8am and 20 = 8 pm. These times go by mud time or local time for the location of the mud not from where the person is connecting from. The last field is simply the message printed on the screen when a connection is disallowed. In the case where more than one entry applies to a site, the entry earliest in the file will be the one used. The banish daemon: The banish command in /cmds/admin/_banish.c can be used to add, remove or list both banished names and sites. The format is slightly different to the access.allow file - the partial site 128.138.*.* as shown above would simply be 128.138 here. Names can also be full regexp constructs, for example '.+uck.*' will forbid any name containing the letters 'uck' unless they only occur as the first three. The save file for the daemon, /adm/etc/banishes.o, is also readable. Banishing users and certain user names is often advantagous. For example, the names root or gamedriver can be dangerous if a user is allowed to use them to log in. This can lead to security problems with the user destroying the files on the mud or insta-wizzing themselves. Also, problem users can sometimes be subdued by disallowing them to log in under their regular characters name. Cursing words may be disallowed to keep players from using them for names. These types of names are often offensive to other players. Finally, some muds choose to disallow players to log in with names corresponding to those of monsters on the mud in order to reduce confusion for players. Imagine you type, "kill ogre" and the person you are playing with is named Ogre. So instead, of attacking the monster in the room, you start fighting with each other. This can be very discouraging.