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Is it possible to detect same player without depends on IP?

Posted: Sat Apr 29, 2017 05:15
by mnh48
I'm asking this because some servers depends on IP address checking to determine if it is the same player. Some even restricts to some numbers of players for certain IP address. Even the banning also applied to IP address (though I know there's some username-based banning but the IP-banning is sometimes used together with it).

TLDR
I want to know if there's a way to detect a player (or at least detect the device that player plays on) so no one should uses multiple user account on certain server. On static IP, this could solve the problems on other players gets banned or kicked when another player on same IP is banned or kicked, though this issue would be hard for those who actually shares the same device among different person to play in different account. On dynamic IP, this would also solve issue when a player could just join after being banned by restarting modem/router/mobile data.

Long version
This is because it is common for certain places to share same internet connection and thus having same external IP address for everyone using the connection (though they will have different internal IP address), especially here where it's not uncommon to see 10 people or more uses the same wireless (HSDPA/LTE) connection because of unavailability of wired connection or unability to get them legally and the godly extreme expensive wireless connection price. Sometimes there will be a device which could further share the existing wireless connection to bridge for 50 people uses same internet connection.

I mean this is not uncommon here

Code: Select all

                     |----more users who connected directly to hotspot
                     |----user (connected directly to hotspot)
                     |----user (connected directly to hotspot)
----------------     |                                       |----user
| Main hotspot |     |                                       |----user
| receiving    | ----|-----------Wireless reshare device ----|----user
| HSDPA/LTE]   |     |                                       |----user
----------------     |                                       |----user
                     |
                     |-----------Wireless reshare device ----|----user
                     |                                       |----user
                     |----more similar Wireless reshare device
                     
Wireless reshare device is the device which connects to one WiFi and use it to broadcast another WiFi to act as bridge to connect more users
Even though not all of them are playing Minetest, there is chance that one day many people will be playing Minetest on this same connection.

Another issue is some country uses dynamic IP by default and static IP is only available for corporate or higher-paying customers. This means when the player is banned by IP, just restart the modem or mobile data and you could continue playing with a new IP address.

In my country, we even get different IP during the "quota shifting" at 1AM & 7AM (Celcom) or some other times (other ISPs) where we would almost usually gets disconnected from servers when it shifts from/to different quota systems (the quota used on these times are different from main quota and is usually cheaper with higher quota value, which is why most students here stayed up late night (1-7AM)).

Re: Is it possible to detect same player without depends on

Posted: Sat Apr 29, 2017 11:28
by rubenwardy
No

Xban2 is the best you'll get

Re: Is it possible to detect same player without depends on

Posted: Sat Apr 29, 2017 13:52
by ExeterDad
I wish the engine would grab the mac address of players and associate it with a login. This info could be used in the firewall or possibly fail2ban. So if you discover a "bad egg" you can block the device no matter what player account or proxy they use. Of course macs can be spoofed. But that would still cull out a bunch of the trash :)

Re: Is it possible to detect same player without depends on

Posted: Tue May 02, 2017 02:05
by Byakuren
I am pretty sure that MAC addresses are not sent to the server, unless the server is on the same local network. If you make the client send the MAC address it could be defeated by just modifying the client, or downloading someone else's modified client.

Re: Is it possible to detect same player without depends on

Posted: Tue May 02, 2017 06:07
by Linuxdirk
ExeterDad wrote:I wish the engine would grab the mac address of players and associate it with a login.
I'm glad it doesn't.

The MAC address is neither unique (even if can be seen as unique and in reality it doesn't really matter) nor an unchangeable fixed value.