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Security / IP filtering options unclear #580

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@ghysler

This is more of a question than an issue/request.

By default, IP filtering is enabled for both clients and servers, and the ipfilter list is automatically updated at startup.
Since I use my own IP filtering on router level, I do not need the IP filtering within the application. After disabling filtering for both clients and servers, the IP filter lists are still processed at startup, as you can see from the log snippet below.

  1. Can we safely assume IP filtering is indeed disabled when filtering on clients and servers is disabled, even though the log shows the filters are loaded at startup?

  2. I have emptied the ipfilter.dat file manually (recreated 0 byte file), but apparently it does not like a completely empty file. Perhaps an option could be added to the GUI to empty the existing ipfilter.dat, as it automatically updated by default and therefor never empty by default.

  3. Is there any way to view or log blocked connections based on built-in filter lists?

  4. "Paranoid handling of non-matching IPs" is enabled by default. The tooltip mentions: "Use with caution", but I am unsure if the "caution" applies to enabling or disabling this option. If caution should be used when enabling, then I would not expect it to be enabled by default. If caution should be used when disabling, the wording could probably be improved, e.g. "Disable with caution".

2026-07-20 16:02:05: Loading IP filters 'ipfilter.dat' and 'ipfilter_static.dat'.
2026-07-20 16:02:05: Failed to load ipfilter.dat file '/home/amule/.aMule/ipfilter.dat', unknown format encountered.
2026-07-20 16:02:05: Loaded 0 IP-ranges from '/home/amule/.aMule/ipfilter_static.dat'.
2026-07-20 16:02:05: IP filter is ready

aMuleGUI 3.0.1-229 on Windows 11 x64
aMuleD developer image 07/20 on Docker Linux 29.6.2

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