I'm not familiar with this subject at all, so I'm trying to initiate some help.

The MUD I currently IMM on, and probably eventually my own MUD, is having problems with some players that were banned, signing in through proxy IP's. They are from a completely different country, yet they'll sign in from IP's from Illinois, Virginia, Maryland, all within the same day.

Is it even feasible to work against something like this? I'm just at a loss. I know there are ways to attempt to cut down on it, implement a character application process, etc, but I'd prefer not to go down that route yet.

If only there were a way to ban the MAC address of the troublemaker, it would take care of all banning issues.  However, I heard even that can be hacked.  I do not know much about proxies, but the host would always be the same wouldn't it? Perhaps you could ban the host name (unless it is really popular).  Other than that, my only other suggestion is to have a newbban command that would ban all new players until things cool down.

I am using the following line of code to retrieve the host name of the client for banning purposes:

[code] hostent *Host = gethostbyaddr((char*)&sock.sin_addr, sizeof(sock.sin_addr), AF_INET);[/quote]
However, my players recieve a message from Nortan Internet Security saying that their client is trying to connect to a DNS server.  Is there a way to prevent this from happening?