some bbs software like mystic bbs, has a feature to blacklist ips that are making too many connections in a short time period to your bbs. this prevents attacks, so its useful. the bad thing with this, is that some times, we as users/sysops do many connection attempts and finally, our ip gets into that file... resulting to not be able to connect, even at our bbs sometimes. also, many sysops don't know about this or they don't know how to clear it or they just forget to clear it, from time to time. this way you loose visitors, who for some weird reason, they got "banned" and not they can't even connect to your bbs. a solution to this problem is obviously, to clear the file. but because we have so many things to do... we will do it automatically, using cron or other event manager. the solution is apply able to any bbs software, you just have to figure out, which file you have to delete etc. for example we will make a simple script to clear a mystic bbs blacklist.txt file. the script is simple as deleting the file and also creating it with the 'touch' command... this is very important! let's see the commands first: rm /blacklist.txt touch /blacklist.txt for a pi installed mystic bbs... you should have something like this: rm /home/pi/mystic/data/blacklist.txt touch /home/pi/mystic/data/blacklist.txt simple! make the script executable and add it as a cron job like. initiate cron editor with: crontab -e MAKE SURE YOU ARE NOT ROOT! make this as a simple/normal user! in the editor that will open add this line in the bottom of the file: 00 */2 * * * example: 00 */2 * * * /home/pi/mystic/clearbllst.sh save and exit the editor... the new cron job will be installed. the cron command/job we applied, will delete the blacklist.txt file every two hours at exactly 00/zero minutes. this means that someone that makes too many logins and got banned... he will have to wait for about two hours to be able to login again. you can change this to whatever you want. for example to erase the file every 12 hours you will enter the command like this: 00 */12 * * * /home/pi/mystic/clearbllst.sh it is very important to re-create the file! if you just delete it, mystic server (mis) will create it, but with root access only! so next time you will go to edit it, you have to be a root user! this is not a good way to do it and the file originally belongs to a normal user. so we execute our cronjob as a normal user and recreate the file, to avoid the creation of the blacklist file with root access. if you liked this tutor press the like button below and subscribe to our ascii-feed... :p [ like ] [ subscribe ] [ back ] .