If you use ssh to connect to a machine and mistype your password,you'll probably have to sit through a couple of seconds of delaybefore you can try again. In theory this delay is supposed to slowdown large-scale password guessing attempts. In practice it'spointless, as anyone who is getting mass-ssh-probed can attest.

Delaying after failed login attempts started in the world of physicalterminals, where it works because the supply of physical terminals youcan try to log in on is

NewsForge has been running a series ofarticles by Brian Warshawsky on the 'Ten Commandments of systemadministration'. His tenth commandment is 'Thou shalt not waste timedoing repetitive and mundane tasks' (article here ,with links to the other nine), where he tells people to automate suchtasks through shell scripts.

There's a number of good reasons to follow this advice; for a start,writing shell scripts is probably less boring than doing these mundanetasks over and over. But there's a slightly