Tag Archives: python

Balance Your Cloud

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Seems like eons ago (just under 6 months..) when I joined Canonical, and hopped on a plane headed for Brussels and UDS-Maverick.

What a whirlwind, attending sessions, meeting the real rock stars of the Ubuntu world, and getting to know my super distributed team.

One of the sessions was based on a blueprint for load balancing in the cloud. The idea was that rather than rely on amazon’s Elastic Load Balancer, you could build your own solution that you could possibly even move around between UEC, EC2, or even Rackspace clouds.
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SSH brute force protection – Its almost always already written

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Every time I get my logwatch report and see the 20 – 40 daily brute force attempts on it, I cringe. I’ve locked it down to a point, but ultimately I prefer convenience on some level. Limiting any one IP to 2 ssh connections every 5 minutes has annoyed me as many times as it has probably saved me. Preventing root from logging in is nice too.

Ultimately though, I wanted a way to fight back against the brute forcers.. to get a step ahead of them. From seeing the success of projects like SpamHAUS and Project HoneyPot, I know that massive group collaboration works. Of course I started thinking how I’d write it in my head. Every time… for months.

Well, once I let go of my egotistical desire to write it, I found this great project, DenyHosts, which does the same thing for the brute force scanners. I just installed it, and already it has added a few IPs to hosts.deny. Go download it, run it, and stop the annoying scanners!