Nice writeup. Although I prefer to automatically configure using Chef, I didn't know of fail2ban and logwatch -- I will definitely look into those. Also, since

Nice writeup. Although I prefer to automatically configure using Chef, I didn't know of fail2ban and logwatch -- I will definitely look into those. Also, since this post is for beginners, you should mention about restarting the sshd over the lish tty and not over the ssh ptty.