Douglas A. Tutty wrote:
I don't figure that there's anything to keep the barbarians from pounding at the gate. Given that they use port scanners to check for open ports, changing the default port propably won't help. Set up sshd for the most restrictive policy that will allow you to do what you need.
It's all automated, and nobody yet is willing to throw a portscanning bot at 65000 ports at a time, so putting ssh on a high port will keep your logs clean. I look after three net-facing ssh installations, and none has seen a single attempt since moving them up high. I've only actually changed the port on one, the others have the router set to forward down to 22.
But yes, forget the password thing, use keys, and you won't care how many guesses they make.