In this tutorial we will show you how to install and configuration DenyHosts on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS server. For those of you who didn’t know, DenyHosts is a log-based intrusion prevention security tool for SSH servers written in Python. It is intended to prevent brute-force attacks on SSH servers by monitoring invalid login attempts in the authentication log and blocking the originating IP addresses. Due to the simplicity of DenyHost and the ability to manually configure your rules it is widely used as an alternative to Fail2ban which is a bit more complicated to use and configure. DenyHosts unfortunately does not support IPv6.
This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo’ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you through the step by step installation DenyHosts on a Ubuntu 16.04 (Xenial Xerus) server.
Install DenyHosts on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS
Step 1. First make sure that all your system packages are up-to-date by running these following apt-get commands in the terminal.
1 2 | sudoapt-getupdate sudoapt-getupgrade |
Step 2. Installing DenyHosts on Ubuntu 16.04.
Install denyhosts package using apt-get command:
1 | sudoapt-getinstalldenyhosts |
Step 3. Configure DenyHosts.
Once the Denyhosts installed, make sure to whitelist your own IP address, so you will never get locked out. To do this, open a file /etc/hosts.allow:
1 | sudonano/etc/hosts.allow |
Below the description, add the each IP address one-by-one on a separate line, that you never want to block. The format should be as follows:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 | # hosts.allow This file contains access rules which are used to # allow or deny connections to network services that # either use the tcp_wrappers library or that have been # started through a tcp_wrappers-enabled xinetd. # # See 'man 5 hosts_options' and 'man 5 hosts_access' # for information on rule syntax. # See 'man tcpd' for information on tcp_wrappers # sshd:114.124.37.154 sshd:114.121.131.131 sshd:172.16.25.156 |
You can further configure any settings in the DenyHosts.conf file by going to the following and updating according to your preference:
1 | sudonano/etc/denyhosts.conf |
Save your work and restart DenyHosts by running the commands below:
1 2 | systemctlrestartdenyhosts.service systemctlenabledenyhosts.service |
View DenyHosts logs:
1 2 | tail-f/var/log/denyhosts tail-f/var/log/secure |
Congratulation’s! You have successfully installed DenyHosts. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing DenyHosts on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you to check the official DenyHosts web site.
