BLACKLISTCTL(8)

okay bestie, welcome to BLACKLISTCTL(8) from the System Manager’s Manual — this is the manual page, but make it make sense 💅

---

💖 NAME 💖

blacklistctl — display and change the state of the blacklistd database. That’s the whole vibe, and she’s serving it.

---

🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

blacklistctl dump [-abdnrw] [-D dbname]

---

✨ DESCRIPTION ✨

blacklistctl is a program used to display and change the state of the blacklistd(8) database. The following sub-commands are supported — and yes, there’s literally one listed here, so let’s get into it:

🗂️ dump

The following options are available for the dump sub-command:

• -a — show all database entries; by default it shows only the active ones. Inactive entries will be shown with a last-access (or, with -r, the remaining) time of ‘never’.
• -b — show only the blocked entries.
• -D dbname — specify the location of the blacklistd database file to use. The default is /var/db/blocklistd.db.
• -d — increase debugging level.
• -n — don’t display a header.
• -r — show the remaining blocked time instead of the last activity time.
• -w — normally the width of addresses is good for IPv4; the -w flag makes the display wide enough for IPv6 addresses.

📊 the output (what you’re actually looking at)

The output of the dump sub-command consists of a header (unless -n was given) and one line for each record in the database, where each line has the following columns:

• ‘address/ma:port’ — the remote address, mask, and local port number of the client connection associated with the database entry.
• ‘id’ — column will show the identifier for the packet filter rule associated with the database entry, though this may only be the word ‘OK’ for packet filters which do not create a unique identifier for each rule.
• ‘nfail’ — the number of failures reported for the client on the noted port, as well as the number of failures allowed before blocking (or, with -a, an asterisk ⟨*⟩).
• ‘last access’ | ‘remaining time’ — the last time the client was reported as attempting access, or, with -r, the time remaining before the rule blocking the client will be removed.

---

👀 SEE ALSO 👀

• blacklistd(8)

---

🫶 NOTES 🫶

bestie, heads up: the blacklistctl program has been renamed to blocklistctl(8).

Sometimes the reported number of failed attempts can exceed the number of attempts that blacklistd(8) is configured to block. This can happen either because the rule has been removed manually, or because there were more attempts in flight while the rule block was being added. This condition is normal; in that case blacklistd(8) will first attempt to remove the existing rule, and then it will re-add it to make sure that there is only one rule active.

---

🕰️ HISTORY 🕰️

blacklistctl first appeared in NetBSD 7. FreeBSD support for blacklistctl was implemented in FreeBSD 11.

---

👑 AUTHORS 👑

Christos Zoulas

---

This lil’ page is from Debian, dated January 27, 2025 — mwah 💋✨