Hi all. Over the past few months, netrek servers I run have come under a distributed denial of service attack that has been pretty constant and insistent. Initially the attacks started out as mass flood connects from a few IPs, but after some measures were put into place to prevent that, the attacks morphed into hundreds and thousands of unique IPs connecting to the server in spaced out intervals so that unique IPs occupy every slot. The slots sit at the login screen, preventing players from connecting. This sort of attack, while currently only directed at me (first at sturgeon, then at my bronco server when I took sturgeon off the metaserver) can be used to knock any netrek server out. With so few servers and server operators, I really think this needs to be addressed. Quozl had put some things on the todo list regarding this, namely some sort of handshake between client and server, but this is really out of my league to implement. So I am asking of the dev community, if you can contribute code to deal with this security hole, please do so. On another note, I am quite distressed at how much pressure is being put on independent server operators to not run public servers. First pulsar, then meeper, and now warped will all forced out of operation by complaints (or criminal behavior) from a vocal few. I think it's a shame we are losing developers due to this sort of thing. More servers and server operators should be encouraged, not discouraged due to fear of spreading out the playerbase. Bill