This is a minor update to the DenyHosts 3.x series. This release fixes a bug when moving between Python 2 and Python 3 environments. DenyHosts should now work equally well under either version of Python.

A new check has been added to confirm IP addresses retrieved from the security log are valid.

DenyHosts will now (optionally) check for break-in attacks against IMAP services such as Dovecot.

A new dependency has been added, the Python ipaddr library is now a run-time requirement.

We are happy to report that lots of work has been going on behind the scenes to improve DenyHosts. Changes that have been introduced since the 2.10 release are as follows:

Initial translation of code from Python 2 to Python 3. DenyHosts can now be run as either a Python 2 or a Python 3 program. The new code has been tested with Pyhton 2.7 and Python 3.4. If you require an older version of Python, please continue to use DenyHosts 2.10 and let us know of your requirements.

Added patch from Fedora to fix initial sync issue and insure info logging stream is active.
(Provided by Jason Tibbitts.)

Added "import logging" to denyhosts.py to avoid errors when setting up logging. (See above change.)

Added option PF_TABLE_FILE to the configuration file. When this option is enabled it causes DenyHosts to write
blocked IP addresses to a text file. The default location is /etc/blacklist. This text file should correspond to a PF firewall table.

At start-up, try to create the file specified by HOSTS_DENY. That way we avoid errors later if the file does not exists. Can be a problem on operating systems where /etc/hosts.deny does not exist in the default configuration.

Added regex pattern to detect invalid user accounts. This blocks connections from remote hosts who are attempting to login with accounts not found on the local system. While these connections to non-existent accounts are relatively harmless, they are usually used as part of a brute force attack and filtering them before they reach OpenSSH is a good idea.

Finally, Jan-Pascal has created a sync server for DenyHosts which will allow DenyHosts services to coordinate lists of banned IP addresses. The new sync server is open source (GPLv3) and can be set up on private servers, networks and VPS. We plan to set up our own sync server in the near future. When a sync server is created it will be announced at http://denyhost.sourceforge.net/news.php

We are pleased to announce the release of DenyHosts 2.10. This new version
is mostly a bug-fix release, with many of the fixes coming from Jason Tibbitts who
packages DenyHosts for the Fedora project. (Thank you, Jason.) In version 2.10,
DenyHosts can now correctly unlock stale PID files, a new systemd service unit file
has been added and DenyHosts now properly logs information when running in foreground
mode. DenyHosts now detects PAM authentication errors on FreeBSD, the example PF
firewall rule was improved and our documentation was cleaned up. DenyHosts no
longer requires that ETC_DIR is declared in the configuration file, and we default
to using /etc as our configuration directory if none is specified.