How To Install portsentry on Debian 10

Learn how to install portsentry on Debian 10 with this tutorial. portsentry is Portscan detection daemon

Introduction

In this tutorial we learn how to install portsentry on Debian 10.

What is portsentry

portsentry is:

PortSentry has the ability to detect portscans(including stealth scans) on the network interfaces of your machine. Upon alarm it can block the attacker via hosts.deny, dropped route or firewall rule. It is part of the Abacus program suite.

Note: If you have no idea what a port/stealth scan is, It’s recommended to have a look at http://sf.net/projects/sentrytools/ before installing this package. Otherwise you might easily block hosts you’d better not (e.g. your NFS-server, name-server, etc.).

There are three methods to install portsentry on Debian 10. We can use apt-get, apt and aptitude. In the following sections we will describe each method. You can choose one of them.

Install portsentry Using apt-get

Update apt database with apt-get using the following command.

sudo apt-get update

After updating apt database, We can install portsentry using apt-get by running the following command:

sudo apt-get -y install portsentry

Install portsentry Using apt

Update apt database with apt using the following command.

sudo apt update

After updating apt database, We can install portsentry using apt by running the following command:

sudo apt -y install portsentry

Install portsentry Using aptitude

If you want to follow this method, you might need to install aptitude first since aptitude is usually not installed by default on Debian. Update apt database with aptitude using the following command.

sudo aptitude update

After updating apt database, We can install portsentry using aptitude by running the following command:

sudo aptitude -y install portsentry

How To Uninstall portsentry on Debian 10

To uninstall only the portsentry package we can use the following command:

sudo apt-get remove portsentry

Uninstall portsentry And Its Dependencies

To uninstall portsentry and its dependencies that are no longer needed by Debian 10, we can use the command below:

sudo apt-get -y autoremove portsentry

Remove portsentry Configurations and Data

To remove portsentry configuration and data from Debian 10 we can use the following command:

sudo apt-get -y purge portsentry

Remove portsentry configuration, data, and all of its dependencies

We can use the following command to remove portsentry configurations, data and all of its dependencies, we can use the following command:

sudo apt-get -y autoremove --purge portsentry

Dependencies

portsentry have the following dependencies:

References

Summary

In this tutorial we learn how to install portsentry package on Debian 10 using different package management tools: apt, apt-get and aptitude.