[Mageia-dev] Fail2Ban vs Blockhosts vs DenyHosts vs iptable throttle for SSH

[Colin Guthrie]

'Twas brillig, and Robert Fox at 19/02/13 11:45 did gyre and gimble:
> On Tue, 2013-02-19 at 12:35 +0100, Guillaume Rousse wrote:
>> Le 19/02/2013 12:20, finid at linuxbsdos.com a écrit :
>>> If that's how you feel about having a program like DenyHosts running by
>>> default, do you feel the same way about having a firewall running and
>>> configured out of the box.
>>>
>>> Is a firewall a sysadmin's or packager's choice?
>> A sysadmin choice. Pushing always more stuff 'by default' doesn't help 
>> users to make educated choices.
> 
> On one hand I agree, on the other hand - we want a distribution which
> simply works and common choices are made (like which firewall) from the
> distro side - a good enough Sysadmin can then change to his/her liking
> afterwards.  This is more or less a distro "philosophy" question, but
> look why "Mint" has become so popular - because many choices are made
> upfront for the user - yet the flexibility is in the system (and enough
> packages) for an advanced user to change them!
> 
> As long as the default settings are documented upfront - I see no issue
> in making such a decision on behalf of the "average" user - and making a
> more security robust distribution.

Yup, I agree with this.

I'm know my way around sufficiently that I can happily change the stuff
I don't like.

I think we do have to pick reasonably sensible defaults. Ultimately
that's what msec does too - defines sensible defaults for the security
level picked.

So overall I'd welcome a default setup that allows things to be more
secure/robust by default (obviously balanced against user experience -
e.g. a *very* secure setup would be to ban all traffic in or out... but
that's not a nice user experience :D).

Col

-- 

Colin Guthrie
colin(at)mageia.org
http://colin.guthr.ie/

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