What is BlackHole? is difficult to express in a few words It's a solution to get trace users who connect via ssh. It was designed for and enviroment with many servers, its not for domestic use.
Basically its a curses ssh client, that can keep trace of the entire ssh session. Is divided into two functionalities:
- User management
- Loging and statistics
- Django
- Paramiko
- MySQLdb
- Urwid
- python-simplejson
- django-qsstats-magic
- python-dateutil
- django_extensions
- libapache2-mod-wsgi (Only if you want to use apache)
Liensed under a BSD-style license.
The main advantage that Blackhole gives you is that you can still use generic users. But without losing track of who is who.
You define a user for the connection and a private key. Then you asign that session configuration to a profile, and then all the users with that profile can login to that host. But you now who is who, and more. You know what he is doing because BlackHole stores all the session activity to a log file.
And have satistics about your users
Also download those session logs
You can have full control of you users, by enable them or disable them. Or enabled them only in a time range, or to a limited group of hosts.
Also they can talk to each other, with it's integrated Chat.
BlackHole must run as the user shell, so the only thing that he can use is BlackHole. I recommend to disable scp and sftp in the BlackHole server.
To get a full overview, and a tutorial on how to install it go to Or download the manual, it has a detailed explanation on how to install it.
BlackHole also haves some extra functionalities, that are disabled by default. You can send a token, to ensure that the user is who he is saying he is.
- You can send it by mail
- You can send it by SMS, but you need a SMSC (this is beacause I work on a Movile Phone Company and i have one)
You can authenticate web users with radius, for this you need to install python-pyrad, if you use this feature I recommend you to also authenticate ssh users with radius.