Fresh Milk

A couple of users informed me of some minor bugs (thanks!), so I’m releasing a small update to fix them. Some of the pattern matching was also improved to handle log lines from a wider variety of ssh versions and authentication methods.

It can be retrieved here: http://www.lumiere.net/~j/login_sentry/

For those unfamiliar with login_sentry, it’s a small perl daemon that watches a system logfile for bad login attempts and temporarily bans hosts (via tcpwrappers / hosts.deny) that fail to authenticate repeatedly. This prevents those annoying brute force ssh attempts from filling up your logfile. Additionally it can also watch for authentication attempts via a few other services (postfix SASL, dovecot, and pwauth).

I use it to prevent brute force login attempts via all my authentication methods (including via webmail) and also ban access to all authenticated services (again, including webmail). Since it doesn’t require anything besides a standard perl install (no special libraries) and bans via hosts.deny instead of firewall rules, it’s fairly portable too.

A few years ago I switched most of my terminals and programs to use UTF-8. For the most part I had no difficulties.

pine is my preferred CLI email client. It understands different character sets and can even convert from UTF-8 into several others (such as ISO-8859-1). However for some reason, they’ve never added the ability to convert from other characters sets to UTF-8. I often receive emails in ISO-8859-1 (it’s the default on many email clients) and many of the special characters ended up garbled, despite pine knowing that UTF-8 is my preferred character set.

I recently checked to see if pine has been updated to support converting into UTF-8 yet. It hasn’t. So I went looking for what solutions others were using. I found a few solutions, one of which I’m using now with good results.

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