IP banning is a Discus Pro feature that allows you to deny access to your board's scripts to any troublemakers. You can specify as many different addresses to ban as you wish. However, it is possible that if you mis-type one of the addresses that you will end up banning yourself. And if you banned yourself, you are also banned from modifying the list of banned IPs. However, it is relatively straightforward to undo an undesired ban if you can't get into your administration program.

IP bans in Discus 4.x are stored in the data/ipbanned.txt file, under the Discus administration directory. IP banning patterns are given there, one per line. Remove the offending pattern(s) from the file to allow your access back in to the board.

1. Download the aforementioned ipbanned.txt file from the data subdirectory of your Discus administration directory to your local machine. Open this file in a text editor (such as Windows Notepad).

2. Identify the offending line(s) causing your IP address to be banned. Delete these lines.

3. Return your modified ipbanned.txt file back to the data subdirectory by uploading it using ASCII mode (overwriting the file that is already there). Set permissions on the file to 0777 (rwxrwxrwx).

4. Access administration. You should now be able to log in again. If not, you have not removed all of the IP banning rules that are preventing you from accessing your system and you need to repeat the above steps.

1. Download your options.txt file from your Discus administration directory to your local machine. Open this file in a text editor (such as Windows Notepad).

2. Locate the relevant IP Banning section. It will look much like the following example:

   ip_banned_40860=192.168.0.*
   ip_banned_40875=pppclient.bad.com
   ip_banned_41393=*.cracker.com
   ip_banned_41521=*.myhost.com
   ip_banned_list=40860,40875,41393,41521
   

3. Determine which of the IP bans is locking you out. In the example above, assume it's *.myhost.com.

4. Remove the line that contains your host name. Above, you would remove the red line. Remove that line entirely from the file.

5. In the "ip_banned_list" line, remove the number that corresponds to the line that you just removed. Above, you would remove "41521" from the list. Also remove any unnecessary commas from the line.

6. Your options.txt file now looks something like this:

   ip_banned_40860=192.168.0.*
   ip_banned_40875=pppclient.bad.com
   ip_banned_41393=*.cracker.com
   ip_banned_list=40860,40875,41393
   

7. Upload your options.txt file back to your Discus administration directory in ASCII mode. Set permissions on the file to 0777 (rwxrwxrwx).

8. Access administration. You should now be able to log in again. If not, you have not removed all of the IP banning rules that are preventing you from accessing your system and you need to repeat the above steps.