Unblocking an IP from Deny Hosts

- Blog
- Linux
April 5, 2010 |
1 min read

As I was setting up my home testing server (Ubuntu Server 9.04), I kept running into issues with Deny Hosts while testing my server's authentication methods. It was a real pain to find out how to remove an IP that has been blocked.

First of all, references to WORK_DIR point to /var/lib/denyhosts/ or something similar on your system.
The default location for the hosts.deny file is /etc/hosts.deny.

Here's the method I used to unblock an IP:

Stop DenyHosts
Remove the IP address from hosts.deny
Remove all lines containing the IP address from the following files:
- WORK_DIR/hosts
- WORK_DIR/hosts-restricted
- WORK_DIR/hosts-root
- WORK_DIR/hosts-valid
- WORK_DIR/users-hosts
Consider adding the IP address to WORK_DIR/allowed-hosts
Start DenyHosts

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