fail2ban, dovecot and brute force attacks

I needed a way to help stop/slow down brute force password attacks on a dovecot pop3 server running on Fedora Core 5. I heard about fail2ban on the dovecot list, it can scan any log file and any time it matches a regex in the log, you can have it block a host using iptables.

When setting fail2ban 0.6.1 up, I also took the tips from The Art of Web ~ System: fail2ban and iptables which adds syslog logging of dropped connection attempts and cleans up the iptables rules a bit.

This regex matches dovecot authentication failures in /var/log/secure:
dovecot.*(?:authentication failure).*rhost=::ffff:(?P<host>\S*)

I also tweaked the SSH failregex to make sure it only matches sshd failures.

You can download my entire configuration file here: fail2ban.conf

Junk in the Trunk

Meg's blog had a link to this store for babies online, and I ran across this onesie, it's awesome!

I can't believe it's March!

Wendy and I are starting to feel a bit settled with Chloe. The toughest thing to adjustment is the drastic change in our sleeping schedules.

We are lucky if Chloe sleeps 4 hours in between feedings during the night, more often she will go about 2-3 hours in between feedings, so that's a lot of waking up. It's toughest for Wendy since she has to do the actual feeding, I will typically get up and make sure they get whatever they need (diaper change, a glass of water, words of encouragement or a kiss) and stumble back to bed.

Aside from that things are going well, Chloe is getting bigger every day, and seems to becoming more aware of her surroundings as well as making a wider variety of noises and funnier faces.

Next Tuesday she'll be a month old!

Here's a funny picture of her sleeping from the other day. Yes, she was really sleeping with her hands sticking straight up in the air! There's more of her in the gallery.

Pictures are Online

I've finally gotten all of Chloe's pictures up, you can view them in our Chloe's photo gallery.

Here is one of my favorites:

T-shirt Folding

I was helping around the house today and doing some laundry, and remembered this awesome T-shirt folding technique from this Japanese video. It's very quick and gives you professional looking folded shirts!

We're Home!

In case you haven't heard yet, Chloe was born Monday Feb 6, 2006 (2/6/2006) at 11:33am. Read more and see pics about it at Wendy's blog.

Still waiting...

Chloe is taking her sweet old time, but my friend Curtis' wife just delivered twins. a couple days ago!