Archive | September 10, 2006

MythTV links

SlashDot misses the mark completely with in inaccurately-titled and summarized pointer to a great Tom’s Hardware story on MythTV. There’s nearly nothing in the story about the Microsoft media device, nor does there have to be. The MM is a plug-in-and-work device that locks you into their choices, their protocols and few extensions. MythTV is for the do-it-yourself tinkerer who wants to do lots more. This one’s been on my to-do list for way too long.

The comments on the Slashdot article are much more worthwhile than the post. Set your threshhold high and you’ll see the moderated posts. A pointer to Jarod Wilson’s installation guide was worth the browsing. Jarod integrates the great documentation on the MythTV site with his own experiences.

BFD Brute Force Detection vs. script kiddies

Tired of the abuse I'm getting on one of the servers exposed to the Internet, I've installed APF, the Advanced Policy Firewall, and BFD, Brute Force Detection on the machine. Webhostgear.com has easy-to-follow installation instructions for APF and BFD respectively.

While plain vanilla iptables was enough to protect the machine from most routine attacks, incessant attempts at logging in to a couple of well-known services on well-known ports was filling the logs and consuming an extrodinary amount of the bandwidth. Now, a script kiddie attempting 13,000 logins will find the machine no longer responding on that IP address.

Interesting technology. BFD uses a script run as a timed job to parse logs, pick up repeats, and bans them by scriping a command line and submitting it to APF. APF also uses the excellent DShield.org list of known problemmatic machines and networks. Very cool. While BFD comes with a set of scripts to parse common exploits, it didn't have one for my ftp server. I'm not sure I've grokked what's needed to set up my own script of rules, but as I couldn't find one on Google, I'll give it a shot, and share my results back to the community once I've got it working.

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This work by Ted Roche is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.