Denyhost 2.6 on CentOS 6.5

Denyhosts is another utility similar to fail2ban. It parses log files to identify potential attacks against SSH services. A clear advantage that Denyhosts has over fail2ban is the synchronisation mechanism since version 2.0[1]. Denyhosts permits communication with a central server to exchange information about denied hosts by other Denyhosts daemons. However unlike fail2ban, it does not modify any firewall (iptables) rules, instead it relies on tcpwrapper and the hosts.deny file to block ssh access. Fail2ban also offers the advantage of monitoring other services and logs, whereas Denyhosts is specific to SSH. There are other utilities which use tcpwrapper such which can handle additional services[2].

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Configuring RANCID on CentOS 6.5

RANCID stands for really awesome new cisco configuration differ[1] and polls Cisco devices to get a copy of the configuration and an inventory of the hardware and commits the details to a version control system such a CVS or SVN. The version control is used to maintain a history of the changes, and any changes to the configuration are reported. There are a number of guides available for installing RANCID[2,4,5], but I’ve documented the steps I took here for my reference.

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