How should DenyHosts be run?
Version 0.9.0 introduces daemon mode support. If you run DenyHosts with the –daemon flag, then DenyHosts will run constantly in the background. See the previous link for more details. In addition to the deamon mode, DenyHosts can also be run periodically from the command line. If you do not wish to use the daemon mode, then I recommend that DenyHosts be run from cron on a routine basis. DenyHosts is fairly lightweight and does not put an excessive drain on system resources. DenyHosts initially checks to see if the sshd log has changed in size and if it determines that it hasn’t, then it exits without further processing. If the log has changed, DenyHosts only examines the portion that has changed. The interval between DenyHosts runs is left up to the user. Personally, I run DenyHosts every 10 minutes.
