How to whitelist an IP address

Whitelisting IP address

The option to whitelist an IP address or an IP segment will allow you to avoid blocking known IPs in cPGuard even if it detects abuse. The whitelist will avoid blocking IPs through the IPDB firewall and brute-force attack mitigation script. Please note that the WAF does not respect IP whitelist as it will affect the web server performance.

How to whitelist IP

You can whitelist a single IP address or an IP segment using App Portal or CLI. The allowed IP address format for the whitelist are given below

1.1.1.1 – To whitelist single IP address

1.1.1.0/24 – to whitelist a network segment

To whitelist an IP address from App Portal, go to Settings >> Security Tools >> and Add the IP to whitelist to “Whitelisted IPs”

To whitelist using CLI, you can use the following command

Why you cannot remove an IP address from IPDB?

The IPDB blocklist is a list of IPs with a low reputation that is distributed to all servers from the central system. Our system will collect the incident reports related to attacks and analyze the source IPs frequently to build this list. So the blocklist is frequently reviewed, rebuild, and distributed to all servers periodically. So the block list in IPDB is a dynamic list that will change every time IPDB reloads the list of blocked IPs ( happens every 2 hours on each server).

That said, even if you remove the IP address from the block list, it may appear again while IPDB reloads the block list. That is why we recommend whitelisting the IP address that you wish to remove from the IPDB block list. So when you whitelist an IP address, that IP address will constantly exclude from the IPDB block list. So that is the reason you are advised to whitelist an IP address to remove it from the IPDB blocking.