I've recently submitted a re-write of the long-broken mask() function
which deviates from the behavior of the old mask() function in a few ways.
1) Domain masks for IPv4 and IPv6 addresses match IP blocks, regardless
of what ban method you're using.
2) I don't enforce length limitations on usernames. This makes no sense
to me
at all. If someone is giving mask() a username over 7 characters,
then that's
a pretty good indication that the server they're on supports
usernames over
7 characters, therefore, a ban should work. Either way, it isn't
mask()'s job
to try to enforce this. If methods 1, 3, 6 or 8 are specified, and the
provided username is over 7 characters, the username pointer is
incremented by one (no, not strlen(username) - 7), in order to make room
for the prepended '*' if it's needed. Otherwise, no length changes
are made.
3) I don't strip "non-printable" characters from the provided address to
generate
a ban mask. Once again, if the server is giving you an address in
this format
then there's no reason why it shouldn't support banning in this
format. If it
doesn't, then it's the server that's broken, not mask().
4) Methods 10-13 are eliminated altogether. They shouldn't be needed, and
they never worked properly anyway.
5) I don't increment the username pointer if the username begins with '~'.
There wasn't much of a practical benefit of this, and in fact, it
only broke
things. If you supplied a username which began with '~' or one of
the other
characters also checked for, and supplied a method number like 0, mask()
generated a ban mask which didn't even match your target.
6) Domains which are under 5 characters in length (such as 'co.uk') are
treated
as tlds. With the old mask(), if you provided method 4 for such a
hostname,
you would end up banning all of .co.uk, which probably isn't the desired
result.
7) You must supply the address in the form [EMAIL PROTECTED]".
Something like mask(foo.bar.com 4) no longer works. I don't see
much of
a need in supporting this, since most of the method numbers deal
with fields
other than the hostname.
Aside from this, I also return an empty string if a ban method outside
of the
support range was provided. The mask() in epic doesn't have a 'default'
case
in its switch() construct, so the buffer referenced by the returned pointer
contained garbage under these circumstances.
If any of you have objections to any of the behavior changes, or have
any suggestions for further improvements, feel free to write me back.
--
John M. Burks (aka nsx)
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