Automating stopforumspam.com

THIS DOES NOT WORK WITH APACHE SINCE IT DOES NOT USE /etc/hosts.deny - See this post instead

Use the following Python script to maintain a file in the hosts.deny syntax so that your Debian/Ubuntu box (or other Linux server) is kept undisturbed by forum spammers -- COMPLETELY undisturbed, as the spammer is disallowed all access to the system.

1. Copy the script to a file on your server, eg. /usr/sbin/stopforumspam.py
2. Make the file executable, eg. chmod +x /usr/sbin/stopforumspam.py
3. Add it to your crontab for automatic execution each night, eg. crontab -e and then insert the line 0 0 * * * /usr/sbin/stopforumspam.py
4. Add the path to the file containing the ip list to /etc/hosts.deny by inserting this line: ALL: /etc/hosts.deny.stopforumspam

The script itself is here, modify it as you need.

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#!/usr/bin/python





import re  
import urllib  
import zipfile





DOWNLOAD_ZIP = "http://www.stopforumspam.com/downloads/listed_ip_7.zip"  
ZIP_FILENAME = "listed_ip_7.txt"





HOSTS_DENY = "hosts.deny.stopforumspam"





# For security purposes we test that each line is actually an IP address  
IP_MATCH = re.compile(r"\d+\.\d+\.\d+\.\d+")





filename, headers = urllib.urlretrieve(DOWNLOAD_ZIP)





z = zipfile.ZipFile(filename)  
ips = z.read(ZIP_FILENAME)





deny_file = file(HOSTS_DENY, "w")





for ip in ips.split("\n"):  
    if IP_MATCH.match(ip):  
        deny_file.write("%s\n" % ip)





deny_file.close()