[Carnage]

Originally Posted by Spinball

So the CIDR (never heard of it before) of 32 means that if you enter an IP to ban it will ban all the IPs in the 0-31,32-63 etc range that the IP falls in? Or what?
What if I want to ban just the single IP as per the original vB IP banning system? Cos that's all that I will ever need to do.

easiest way to explain the cidr range is thus:

imagine the ip address as a big binary number. each of the . seperated parts equates to 8 bits so an ip address as a number would look like this:

00000000 . 00000000 . 00000000 . 00000000

32 binary bits in total. The cidr range is specifying how meny of those bits must match before the ip is considered banned.

specifying a cidr range of 32 means that ALL 32 bits must match and is thus the same as banning a single ip.

The real power comes in when you want to ban larger ranges for people who have dynamic ip addresses. a cidr range of 24, for example matches only the most significant 24 bits of the ip so for the following ip, if all the 0's match it wouldn't matter what the x was set to

00000000.00000000.00000000.xxxxxxxx

this is equivilant to banning an ip with only three segments to it.

Currently the cidr is hard coded at 16, mostly because i didn't want admins on my own forums accidentilly banning the entire board cause they didnt know what it did. This will probably become an option at some point in the future (eg setting the max allowed cidr range)

There is a note saying to leave the cidr at 32 if you dont know what it does

Edit: just to clearly answer your question, If you just want to ban a single ip address, leave the cidr set to 32.