Some useful information about DenyHosts as packaged by Fedora Extras
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It installs and runs as a service, so you can start it with:
service denyhosts start
and enable it at boot time with:
chkconfig denyhosts on
By default it will process your logs every ten minutes. You can
change the interval by editing /etc/cron.d/denyhosts. You can see a
description of the file format by running:
man 5 crontab
By default, DenyHosts is set up to purge old block entries, but only
after one year. If you wish to adjust this, edit /etc/denyhosts.conf
and look for "PURGE_DENY". The purge procedure is run daily at 5AM.
To adjust this frequency, edit /etc/cron.d/denyhosts.
DenyHosts will process only your current logfile (/var/log/secure).
If you want to incorporate an old logfile (in this example,
/var/log/secure.1) , you can run
denyhosts.py -c /etc/denyhosts.conf /var/log/secure.1
DenyHosts can also handle logs compressed with gzip or bzip2.