For those of you who have some 'enemies' or simply wanna restrict access to their servers then this section is for you. Right-click on the IP List (right column) and select 'Add IP', the form below appears:
Using this form you can allow/refuse access based on IP Addresses/hostnames. In our example above we have defined 3 access rights:
+192.168.0.*: allows anyone from 192.168.0.* to connect
+192.168.1.*: same with anyone coming from 192.168.0.*
-192.168.0.[1-3]: refuses IPs from 192.168.0.1 to 192.168.0.3 in order to restrict previous rules
These above settings allow only people from the local intranet to log in.
Supported wildcards
Well, to define access rules you can use the following wildcards: ?, *, [xxx-xxx].
For example:
- 19?.16?.*.[100-120]: 192.163.125.101 and 190.168.5.116 can login, 190.168.5.1 can't since '1' is not in [100-120]
- use *.wanadoo.fr if you do not like people coming from wanadoo.fr
How does it work exactly?
As long as you do not specify any IP address everyone can connect, but as soon as you specify only one (+)-IP address, only users belonging to these IPs can log in! As soon as you setup a (-)-mask everyone not belonging to the excluded IPs can connect.
For example:
- no mask is specified: everyone can connect (as you may have guessed)
- the (-)-mask is undefined, the (+)-mask is set to +192.168.0.*: only users having IPs starting with 192.168. can connect
- the (+)-mask is undefined, the (-)-mask is set to: -192.168.0.1, -192.168.0.4: everyone except those two IPs can connect