Economy Size Geek

Fine I admit it - I’m one of the application developers that true Sys-Admins hate. Yes - I admit it - I don’t care about security. Ok that’s probably too strong a statement - I do care but I will admit that it’s not often the first thing on my mind.

I’ve been working on making sure that Cross side scripting and SQL injection don’t effect my rails apps. But my server is another matter.

I mean I try to keep it up to date. Thanks to sarge I’ve been able to stay on the straight and narrow of released (All the other servers I have end up running Debian unstable).

That being said I ran across this today:

Preventing SSH Dictionary Attacks With DenyHosts

I’m a big fan of HowTo Forge already - since they have a number of articles that helped me get things sorted out that I’m sure I could have figured out eventually but it’s so much nicer to just be able to sit down and get something to work and then start tweaking as oppsoed to my normal method - which is to spend a lot of time just getting it to work.

The basic idea of the tool is that it tracks bad login attempts and just shuts out the ip address. Seems straight forward enough. Just the kind of security I like - make sense on it’s face and isn’t terribly difficult to install or remove. Maybe I’ll get the hang of this Sys-Admin thing some day…