Flagging user based on his IP

[Pedja 0]

I would like to have an option to flag users depending on their IP. for instance I want to be able to see what exact ISP user is coming from. I have list of IP ranges belonging to specific ISP's I am interested in.

Also it would be good if Apex is able to downlad such IP list from use definable location, so we can set eveyone in our community to be able to use the same list maintained at one place.

[A_Alias 0]

for what ??

to block the ones you dont like ?????

some hub software have ugly futures like that ... let only users from a few (fast) isp on it ... but i dont think it should be a part from a client.

( into otherwords if you have an ugly ISP that make divrends to local and world wide transfairs ... create you own my_isp_is_sucks_hub and filter at hubsoftware who is allowed to use that hub)

A_Alias

[amp 0]

I can partially support this. 'cause we don't have unlimited internet access and we have to pay for traffic (0.06$ per MB). Only ISP's internal traffic is free. So, we have to block any incoming and outgoing activities of the DC to keep it free for us. This also includes blocking users from other ISPs.

Actually, we use firewalls, but each new user have to set it up personally with his own software installed. Making settings for "allowed ranges" in one place would be nice. On per hub basis.

[ProProductions 0]

Right well first let me point something out. Some hubs now use IP blocking so end users who download/upload dont directly see another users IP. So a flagging system is just not a good idea.

Besides that Apex has built in PeerGuardian support which COULD be setup to block certain IP ranges.

BUT you need to remember that blocking ranges of IP's will end up with you getting banned from hubs. So it just isnt a good idea to be blocking too many IP's in the first place.

[Pedja 0]

I neeed this kind of flagging just to make user able to know who is from which ISP.

We run community hub in our local wireless community network. But we opened hub for connections from Internet too. There are also three ISP in the town and users from those ISPS's also come to our hub. Flagging would allow them to know who is from which ISP, so they can try to download from each other using local networks, instead using up their internet links.

If I need to limit traffic, I surely would not ask for client features but handle it on hub or router.

There is also one more nice idea: Apex supports GEOIP flagging using GeoIPCountryWhois.csv. It would be nice if we can have something like GeoIPcustomWhois.csv where we can add our custom IP information.

Our network uses local IP addresses, but spreads to several areas of the town. We could use it to flag local IP-s to make it recognizable which network member is from which part of town (or which Access Point he is connected to).

That would also be helpful for economic usage of network resources, since users would know who is on the same Access Point and try to download from them first, to get best speed and do not spend network resources.

I know I can simply edit GeoIPCountryWhois.csv and add information about local IP's, but as this can upgraded by downloading new version of GeoIPCountryWhois.csv from the Internet, those settings would be lost on each upgrade. That's why I am suggesting separate file for cutom definitions as it would stay intact on upgrade.

[CrazyBerserk 0]

@Pedja:

As far as I understand your post, you have control over your hub. So my suggestion would be to use a nickname prefix system based on the ISP's IP ranges in your hub software. I don't know what hubsoft you are using, but there are some where such feature is built-in, as YnHub and I guess also Ptokax. At least that's what we are doing on our hubs in our LAN to recognize users with slower uplinks to the rest of the LAN and therefore minimize uplink traffic and make them prefer users from their own hostels, which is also much faster for them.

Furthermore, I guess in most hubs it's not activated that a normal user can see the IP addresses of all other users right after logging in. He will only see the IPs of users he already connected to, which would make such feature in the client rather useless. But well, from our LAN I cannot connect to internet hubs, so I don't know for sure. :-)