In January 2017, I wrote an article about how to protect your Wordpress blog using the WP Fail2Ban plugin, fail2ban on your Linux/ FreeBSD host, and CloudFlare. Back then, the fail2ban was using the CloudFlare API V1, which was already deprecated since November 2016. [caption id=“attachment_3785” align=“alignnone” width=“640”] Free-Photos/ pixabay.com/ Creative Commons CC0[/caption] Although the actions were updated later to use CloudFlare API V4, I still had problems with the unbaning of IP addresses.

While searching for a simple monitoring für my root servers, I’m stumbled over a python-based software called Simplemonitor. Other alternatives, like Nagios, or forks like Incinga etc., were a bit too much for my needs. What is SimpleMonitor? SimpleMonitor is a Python script which monitors hosts and network connectivity. It is designed to be quick and easy to set up and lacks complex features that can make things like Nagios, OpenNMS and Zenoss overkill for a small business or home network.

I don’t like to use untrusted networks. When I have to use such a network, e.g. an open WiFi network, I use a TLS encrypted tunnel connection to encrypt all web traffic that travels through the untrusted network. I’m using a simple stunnel/ Squid setup for this. My setup consists of three components: Stunnel (server mode) Squid proxy Stunnel (client mode) What is stunnel? Stunnel is an OSS project that uses OpenSSL to encrypt traffic.