Preventing Brute Force Attacks With BlockHosts

In this article I will show how to install and configure BlockHosts on a Debian Etch system. BlockHosts is a Python tool that observes login attempts to various services, e.g. SSH, FTP, etc., and if it finds failed login attempts again and again from the same IP address or host, it stops further login attempts from that IP address/host. By default, BlockHosts supports services that use TCP_WRAPPERS, such as SSH, i.e. services, that use /etc/hosts.allow or /etc/hosts.deny, but it can also block other services using iproute or iptables. What do you think about software like BlockHosts? If users have strong passwords then software like BlockHosts will not be useful. Personal I don't like having my firewall change depending on if a script kiddie is trying a brute force attack on my network.