I recently had enough of all the "*** GMX Antispam ***" lines in my kmail junk folder and tried to get rid off it. (It also marked false positivies in my incoming folder which also annoyed me).

I've just found a nice article about enabling DNS-Cache for Konqueror at fedorawiki.de. It's very useful, because Konqueror doesn't provide this feature. If you take e.g. the german freemail provider http://gmx.net, Konqueror sends a huge amount of dns queries to load all the pictures and stuff. You really notice the performance gain if you cache these queries with a local DNS server, for example dnsmasq.

(Updated version: http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_BlockHosts)

Protecting SSHd (and others) with BlockHosts

What is BlockHosts?

Blockhosts is a python script which records how many times a system service has been probed, using configurable pattern matching to recognize failed accesses (such as for "sshd" or "proftpd" or any service), and when a particular IP address exceeds a certain number of failed attempts that IP address is blocked by using one of the following techniques, e.g.:

• using TCP_WRAPPERS (writes to /etc/hosts.allow)
• using "ip route" commands to setup null-routing for attackers
• using IPtables to setup packet filtering for attackers