What is UTAN?
 

Basically its a free public system to store your UT2003/UT2004 GUID and IP server bans in such a way that they can be rolled out to all servers under your control automatically.

Part of the UTAN system allows the trusted admin's (Head Admin's at various GISP's) to add bans into our system so that they will be distributed to all servers running our server actor. We understand how controversial this could be and have setup the system so that if you don't want these global bans, so to speak, you don't have to receive them!

The system allows you to store you own bans for use of either your server or your GISP only, which are protected by a password. So storing all your bans in our system is possible making it very quick and efficient at sending the bans out to your servers.

The Server Actor was initially created by El_Muerte, an admin at UnrealAdmin. Since then we have moved onto the new improved version of the Server Actor which provides Web Admin changes, understandable ban messages and live e-mail updates. It won't remove your server from the standard server lists on the master server either!

Lastly, the UTAN system is constantly being developed, so over time you will see more options available to you to use for your servers. Things like timed bans, so you can ban someone for 30minutes, 30hours, even 30days if needs be, anti-cheat news, and IP range banning are currently in the pipeline.

We hope you enjoy using the service and if you have any questions about the system please don't hesitate to contact us at [email protected].


Thank you

The Unreal Trusted Admin Network Administrators.

This sounds like quite a nice idea in that the whole system is centralized. I understand the controversy though. If one player gets banned when he shouldn't be, that's going to be a lot of servers he can't go to.

We always provide evidence to support such a ban, either demo's, screenshots or log file (AntiTCC logs etc.) No global ban is ever entered without at least 1 of these.

Do administrators have the option to not include global bans?

bReceiveUTANBans=True/False

I would have almost expected that to be a web site option not a setting on each server. Not sure why though. I can't give an argument why it would be one way over another.

We debated this for some time. However, we came to the conclusion that it should be held on the game server. If it were tagged to your user name on UTAN, any server you used your user name on would automatically receive those settings. This does not allow you then to customise each of your server's settings which we believe may be a hinderance.

At sometime in the future this may change.

Well, as it stands how do servers indicate that they want to share ban lists? IE, I have 4 servers that I want the ban lists to be sync'd. What specifies this in the server config? There must be some unique/group id registered with UTAN, right?

You use your UTAN User Name and password to request the ban lists. You will then receive all the UTAN Bans, if you choose to, and your GISP/Clan bans, if you choose to.

does the UTAN config go in your server.ini file or does it have a seperate ini file? Also, does it log anything to UserLogs?

I see. Well tbh I'm not that much a fan of total centralisation. That's why I was asking elsewhere if you could store any information on your web site and then have it transferred here if you wish.

It goes in whatever ini you use for your server. It logs when its connecting to our server, and how many bans it gets. It will also log to its own file in the Logs directory when someone was kicked.

It's an option we could do, but it would'nt be before UTAN v2.0

Make sure that the log file is unique to at the very least the server port. Otherwise, admins running multiple servers on the same box will not be able to run UTAN on more than one server instance.

There is no seperate log file generated as this started to cause problems on some OS's, and the settings for UTAN are included in the ini file for your server.

Thanks for taking this idea into consideration and don't let distract you from rolling out this very first version ;) . I don't know how your system works (how much is uscript and how much is outside code) and this would certainly make it more complex. But there would be a few benefits :

- Outside web sites using a sub set of the UTAN system could function independantly and do so even if the main site goes down for some reason.
- Large ban lists could be processed locally and then transferred to the global system in just one click.
- In case of system failure (sh*t happens), admins could have the possibility of making a backup of their own UTAN databases. This would make the whole system more fail-safe.
- Overall, processing requests from the pov of the main UTAN database would be reduced to a necessary minimum.

The server attempts to contact to UTAN on every level change. If it cannot connect for whatever reason, the previously downloaded list is used. Only when a connection is successful, and the data received has passed integrity checks, then the CD-Key database is rebuilt.

We've been running our own box with several servers on it since 2003, some of those servers are public, in a few months we will start one or two public ut2k4 servers, could I become a trusted admin too as we're not a customer of a GISP

The system is open to any UT2004 admin. :cool:

So this means there is a single log file? If so, GISP's are not going to be able to use this system (note: I'm not a representative of any GISP). Many mutators are able to handle multiple log files just fine. I would ask around.