Frank_Rizzo - 11:38 am on Mar 19, 2007 (gmt 0)

I like the idea of running ssh on a seperate IP address.

The ultimate defence though is to turn it off when not needed. If you only ssh in for 10 minutes a day to check something why let it run for the other 1430 minutes?

OK, some sites may need it running 24/7 but there's probably a lot of sites which don't and would be wise to shutdown the ssh server when not in use.

The best way to do this IMO is to use email and a procmail recipe to swtich on and off the services.

I posted on a similar thread about webmin. Just setup a recipe to detect a particular user and subject like

ssh OFF or ssh ON

When you then need to access the server via ssh you just email services_control@yourserver.com with the appropriate header in the subject.