Key takeaway:<p>> And as several correspondents have reminded me already -- switching your sshd to keys only authentication will let you sleep better at night.<p>Even with fail2ban and limited retries, there's no excuse for using password-based authentication anymore. Use an SSH key, protect the key with a password, and turn off password login on all your servers.<p>Other than that, the main gist of this post is: on most platforms, the default settings for remote login already make brute-force login attempts annoying at best, and with fail2ban or something similar, it's a non-issue.