Hello. My question is, is there a way to restrict access to my server for some countries? I think I've encountered such a server, but I forgot who he was.. I want to make sure only my people from my country have access to my server.

You can read their IP address, convert that to a country and block them if country isn't the one you want to allow. You have to remember though that getting another IP address from an allowed country, isn't that hard these days, so it will never be a bullet proof system.

As in post above - yes,you can blacklist IPs and even ranges of IPs. I recall Cargame's Dave went even further by blacklisting whole continents as he wanted to prevent people with high latency to join his servers.

Thanks for the quick answers. Because I have no idea how these things are done can you point me how to make this black list. I have no idea how I can understand a person's IP address. I just want my server to play quietly without some people spoiling the nice atmosphere.

Then easiest way is to put password on and share it with people who you want to join your server.

Yes this is the easiest and most convenient way. But can you tell me how I can restrict a country / continent? Of course, if it's not too complicated to be explained.

I don't know how exactly,you'll need some networking experts to reply here. But for better help,maybe post info where is your server hosted - on your own PC or on some remote server. If the latter - how much access do you have to it. It's not same for every situation.

Thank you very much for the answer! I think this option is complicated for me because I do not understand these things. I'll put a password on the server and stop the offenders.

What about a compromise solution: Insim script that reads user's country from lfsworld and do the filtering. This of course means, that user with hidden stats would be rejected also.

Is there such an insim here? Or it has to be worked out

It might be a lot of work telling your firewall to block

https://lite.ip2location.com/ip-address-ranges-by-country

Insim can do this things if it's properly coded! You will need the NCI packet and some code knowledge to do it! Good luck!

Thanks for all the answers.

Quote from Eclipsed :

I recall Cargame's Dave went even further by blacklisting whole continents as he wanted to prevent people with high latency to join his servers.

Even further, only during high peak hours of the day and not appearing in the online LFS listing anymore. The time difference is only five hours so its evening on both continents on a certain point which is very inconvenient.

It's a really bad idea to be "one server for the world" especially when there are people which only understand a different world language (Spanish/Portuguese). It gets enormously exhausting to explain every time to various people how the internet works.

It's by the way ridiculous to see that https://ella.link still is not completed. One UEFA world tournament and one Olympic Games event didn't change anything. Every year the completion date is added with +1 year. What I remember from it was reporters complaining that their live downlinks didn't work. Well.. Saw that one coming. Atlantis-2 is congested for over a decade now already, 40 Gbit/s is absolutely nothing for a whole continent.

Registered cargame.la (Los Angeles but it's also short for LatinAmerica), hired a US based server and did MySQL live data replication to work around the problem but people didnt understand. Only people from Europe connected to this server, seeking some quietness for online hotlapping.

Some idea's came from the COD2 servers which we ran pretty successfully before the LFS project started. The track voting screen idea is coming from this period but the COD2 "insim" mod also had server load balancing.. Could redirect connecting clients automatically to another server, that was awesome. Sadly LFS doesn't support such techniques.

Filtering ip adresses in your router should help, if possible. I think more expensive routers have this option, but only for specific ip/mac, don't know if you can filter countries or continents

EDIT: insim should help with filtering the people by the lfsworld info, no need to use IP and stuff