Fail2ban has served me well the last couple of years, but it doesn't support IPv6 and the last release was on 7-9-2009 which is almost 2 years ago. This didn't give me the idea the IPv6 support would ever be implemented. But then again, I can be wrong...

I gave a stab at writing my own implementation which would support IPv6 and started looking on freshmeat looking for similar scripts to see how they worked. Then I found a small Perl script called autofwd written by Arthur Corliss. I downloaded it to see how if there was any usable code in there but quickly found out that it actually was the tool I was looking for. It's portable, so you can use any kind of firewall with it. I myself use shorewall and it took me only a couple of minutes to plug that in.

If you're looking for a flexible/portable fail2ban replacement I certainly recommend looking at autofwd. It doesn't have a homepage but you can get it here. I've created a Debian package which is available here.

I already knew that .local is not a correct tld, but since it was recomended by Microsoft to use this when installing Active Directory we used it. I never had any problems with it because most of the time I just use ip addresses when I need to access a server.

Now I installed a proxy server and a new mail relay server so I started using them as proxy.mycompany.local and relay.mycompany.local. The I found out that none of my Debian or Ubuntu workstations would resolve those addresses. At first I blamed the Microsoft DNS server for this. That's the easiest and most logical thing to do ;-). But Windows XP/Vista clients did resolve those addresses. Strange huh?

Then I started wireshark on my client. I did a query for proxy.mycompany.local and then there was.... an MDNS request instead of a normal DNS request?!?

This quickly gave me the conclusion that it was something avahi related because this does all the zeroconf stuff with Debian/Ubuntu. Avahi seems to be configured to pick up any request ending in .local and make MDNS requests for it. This must be a problem for more people because there must be loads of Microsoft networks out there ending in .local. I won't say this is a fault from the avahi guys because it's also completely wrong to use .local as tld.

My current solution is to just simply disable Avahi on my workstations. On Ubuntu I just do 'System -> Administration -> Services' and disable 'Multicast DNS Service Discovery' there. With Debian I just disable the startup of Avahi in /etc/default/avahi-daemon by settting 'AVAHI_DAEMON_START=0'.

auto eth0.10
  iface eth0.10 inet static
  addres 10.0.0.2
  netmask 255.255.255.0
  gateway 10.0.0.1

Just make sure you dit 'apt-get install vlan' or something like that.

In /etc/network/interfaces you add the following:

# Vlan 10
iface vlan10 inet static
    adress 10.0.0.2
    netmask 255.255.255.0
    gateway 10.0.0.1
    vlan_raw_device eth0

This will add vlan10 to interface eth0. It's so easy but I just cannot remember it when I need it.

I'm thinking about packaging feedbackd and use it together with keepalived to adjust the weight of realservers during runtime. I'm not sure if it's feasible, else I will write my own poor mans implementation.

Nagios 3 looks good. It has some nice new features like the multi line output for plugins. This wil likely make it possible to run more checks with less stress on the Nagios server. I'll post more when I find more nice features :-)

• Video card (Intel 945GM)
• DVD/CD writer
• Wireless Card (Intel 3945ABG Needed to download the driver from ipw3945.sf.net
• Soundcard (after upgrading from the current 2.6.16 etch kernel to a custom 2.6.17.10 kernel)
• USB stuff...
• The duo processor (after installing the -smp kernel)

Well most likely I forgot stuff..... Take a look here.