The FreeBSD ports collection may be a tough nut to crack if you’re used to easier package distribution systems like those found on Ubuntu or Redhat. In many ways, I find it easier to manage. The ports collection grants you greater control over what is installed, how it is configured, what dependencies you’d like to build (or rebuilt), and what upgrade path you’d like to choose whenever upgrading packages. The ports collection is so good, in fact, that several Linux distributions now borrow from the principles set forth by the FreeBSD foundation what seems like eons ago (Gentoo and its derivatives, specifically). It can be daunting to manage ports at first, but you’ll find that it offers you freedom that simply couldn’t be had from binary packages.

After all, FreeBSD is about freedom.

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.

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!