Parsing Syslog and Acting on it, using other input too

Fri Aug 30 14:00:06 UTC 2013

On Fri, Aug 30, 2013 at 8:55 AM, Shawn Wilson <ag4ve.us at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> Christopher Morrow <morrowc.lists at gmail.com> wrote:
>>On Thu, Aug 29, 2013 at 10:50 AM, Don Wilder <don.wilder at gmail.com>
>>wrote:
>>> I wrote a script in Linux that watches for unauthorized login
>>attempts and
>>> adds the ip address to the blocked list in my firewall. You might
>>want to
>>> search sourceforge for a DYN Firewall and modify it from there.
>>>
>>
>>because fail2ban was too hard to install? or because you just wanted
>>to test yourself?
>
> Actually I did the same. I use ipset lists (generally with a timeout) and take a regex or two and black / white list from a YAML file and just take (possibly multiple inputs) from piping tail -F. I also store addresses for future reference (by the script or otherwise).
>
> This is quite maintainable as I can look at a list of people who have attacked the mail server and compare it to web attacks. Each process is a different type of service (different config file) and probably a different ipset. Due to ipset not actually doing anything until I make an iptables rule for it, I can run my script in a test mode (by default) and just see what happens (check it's logs and the ipset list it generates). I haven't found the need for this yet but I can use cymru to look up how big their net is (see geocidr for an example of how to do this in perl) and use a hash:net ipset type and cover a whole net.
>
> Basically what I'm saying in doing it this way is quite expandable and isn't very hard and I can do tons of stuff that fail2ban can't (I don't think - it's been a while since I looked).

you seem to be describing what fail2ban does... that and some grep of
syslog for fail2ban messages. If your solution works then great! :)