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### HARDWARE BANS ###
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HARDWARE GUID BAN - To determine if you were HARDWARE banned, you can look in your Americas Army/ System folder and open the ArmyOps.log. There is a ton of info in this file… so select EDIT on the toolbar and use FIND to search for the word “kick”. There may be several “kick”s…. so read each one. If you see “KICK NOTIFICATION: -playername- has been kicked for an undefined reason: YOU HAVE BEEN PERMANENTLY BANNED FROM THIS GAME SERVER VIA PUNKBUSTER ... GLOBAL PUNKBUSTER HARDWARE BAN 2B48CD61” … then this means your computer has been HARDWARE GUID banned. The 2B48CD61 is the GUID assigned to your computer ban. Whenever you try to use that computer… you will always see the same HARDWARE GUID number.
QUESTION: How does PB ban my computer ???
ANSWER: PB scans your computer and collects the following information…
1) Hard Drive SMART information (if available) (for each hard drive installed)
2) Hard Drive serial number (for each hard drive installed)
3) Network Adapter MAC address (for each NIC installed)
Once this info is collected, PB creates a private hash (a unique alpha-numberic code). It is estimated that this hash will only change when aprox 50% to 75% of the items above above are changed (although this varies based on your pc configuration). As a result, you may need a new hard drive(s) and a new Network adaptor(s) in order to play on PB enabled servers again.
** EXCEPTION: I use a RAID controller which prevents PB from obtaining any of the desired information about my hard drives. Therefore, when I was hardware banned, I tried two things to get un-banned… and they both worked.. First, I changed my network adapter. This un-banned me. Second, I used SMAC 1.2 in order to spoof or fake my banned network card MAC address. This un-banned me.
** FYI: There are rumors that if you play a new, clean or un-banned character on a pc that is hardware banned, the new character will also be globally GUID banned or banned in some way related to your computer HARDWARE GUID ban. I have found this to NOT be correct (assuming you no longer have any hacks or file mismatches). During my testing, I have used multiple players while testing how to get my hardware un-banned... and none of those have been banned yet. Yes, they get kicked because of the hardware ban… but my armyops.log always showed the same BAN number regardless of which character I used… which means PB was kicking my players based on that specific pc BAN… not based on the character. Furthermore, I can still use those characters on any un-banned computer.