Nick decided that he wanted a more visual representation of the attempts bots made to attack and gain access to his server. To do this, he took a Raspberry Pi Zero W, a Pimoroni Blinkt and a 7-segment display and created a device called the PiAlert, the case of which was 3D-printed. For the software, he configured fail2ban (which monitors log files) to trigger a special action whenever it detected a potential intrusion. The triggered action is a Python3 script (which Nick admits is an absolute mess!) which acts as an HTTP server, listening for the notifications from fail2ban and lighting up LEDs accordingly. The 7-segment display is also updated to show the number of intrusion attempts made.

You can read more about the device on Nick’s blog, including how to do it yourself..

Here is a video of the PiAlert in action: