November 2020 – IGM IT

fail2ban (CentOS 8)

Nov 302020

Install Fail2Ban and configure some default settings:

sudo yum update
sudo yum install epel-release
sudo yum install fail2ban
sudo nano /etc/fail2ban/jail.local

A typical template for jail.local looks like this:

[DEFAULT]
bantime = 43200
findtime = 600
maxretry = 3
banaction = iptables-multiport
backend = systemd

[sshd]
enabled = true

ignore = a list of I.P address that you do not wish to ban

bantime (seconds) – typical values are:
3600 (1 hour); 10800 (3 hours); 21600 (6 hours)
43200 (12 hours); 86400 (24 hours)

maxretry is the number of failures before a host is banned. Default value is 3.

findtime (seconds) and maxretry are related. Combined, they dictate the number of attempts (maxretry) within a given timeframe (findtime) which results in a ban. Default value of findtime is 600, which means that when fail2ban counts 3 failed attempts, within the last 10 minutes, it will ban the querying IP address.

Good values for findtime are:
300 or 600 (300 seconds = 5 minutes, 600 = 10 minutes)
3 for maxretry

Enable Fail2Ban at reboot, start the service, and check status:

systemctl start fail2ban
systemctl enable fail2ban
systemctl status fail2ban
fail2ban-client status
fail2ban-client status sshd

Visual Studio Code installation & extensions

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Nov 302020

Render spaces as dots – useful for sanity-checking files.
Go to settings; type “white space”
In the first option – “Render Whitespace” – change this from “selection” to “all”

The default colour scheme can make it difficult to see the dots. The colour can be changed. The following is from https://thenetworktransit.com/whitespace-in-vs-code/
who did all the heavy lifting here i.e. scouring the correct VS setting that is required.

Go to settings; type “Color Customization”
3rd option down – Workbench: Color Customization – click “edit in settings.jason”
Add the line:

"editorWhitespace.foreground": "ffa500"

E.g. it should look like this:

{
"editor.renderWhitespace": "all",
"workbench.colorCustomizations": {
"editorWhitespace.foreground": "ffa500"
}
}

Quit and relaunch Visual Studio

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