I used to use FreeBSD to exclusion of most other *nixes (even other BSDs). So far, I’ve been pretty impressed with the changes and progress the project has made. It’s an incredible leap forward from the BSD I used to know back in the 5.x branch.

Ever since I installed SP3 last year during a lull in my fall classes, I noticed that the power saving state on my display wouldn’t always work. Eventually, it didn’t work at all. If I opened the dialog to configure power saving modes, clicked apply, and then closed the menu, power savings would return to normal–until the next reboot. It was infuriating at best, especially if I forgot to turn my monitor off and left for a half hour or more. I’d return, the monitor would still be on, and the screensaver would be happily chugging away.

Thankfully, I believe I fixed the problem.

I’ve released a beta of Watcher v0.1. This script monitors a specified message log for connection activities, and if these activities exceed a configurable threshold, Watcher will add the source IP address(es) to iptables. This is great for SSH probes, DNS reflector DDoS, and more! Rule set matches are fully configurable and include an option to write custom regular expressions to assist in matching log entries the pattern language cannot. The default rule sets should work just fine, however.

Currently, Watcher only works with a fairly modern Linux distro. FreeBSD ipfw and OpenBSD pf support is forthcoming. There are some other requirements. Keep reading to find out what these requirements are, how to obtain this script, install it, and use it!