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 …

Server security is something I’ve always tried to keep myself up-to-date on. I have at least a dozen RSS feeds that I read daily to learn about the latest flaws, holes releases etc. That being said I am by no means an “expert”, I’ve learned what I’ve needed to learn over time. I like to think that over the years I’ve gained enough knowledge to almost completely secure servers with all the programs installed that I generally use.

The aim of this article is to introduce you to some of the programs I use for security and some config changes that can be made to other programs to make them more secure. It is aimed at web servers but other changes work anywhere, like the SSH changes.