I wrote this little Python program a while ago and now people are starting to email me about it, asking for it to be part of the DenyHosts Debian packages so I figured I’d write a quick article on it.

If you’re like my developers, you’ll find yourself getting banned from servers all the time and have to come speak to someone like me (your sys engineer/admin), or maybe you are an admin and are sick of people banning themselves and want and easy way to unban them.

So give this a try:

https://github.com/kura/denyhosts-unban

From the GitHub page you can download either the tarballs, zipballs or a Debian .deb package. Install it using the instructions in the README and you’re good to go.

sudo denyhosts-unban 10.0.0.1 …

If like me you run in to issue when using OpenJDK, my issues come from it’s memory problems when you’re allocating and using large amounts of memory - mostly for Solr where we’re concerned but obviously I’d switch for other high memory usage instances too.

So without further ado, lets get the installation going.

You’ll need Debian’s “add-apt-repository”, on servers this doesn’t usually come by default so we’ll need to install it.

sudo apt-get install python-software-properties

Next we need to add Java’s PPA.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:sun-java-community-team/sun-java6

Once this is done we’ll need to update our apt caches and install Java 6.

sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jdk

Now that this is installed we should get the Java version, remember it for future.

java -version

You’ll get something like this

java version "1.6.0_20" OpenJDK Runtime Environment (IcedTea6 1.9 …