This works great for reducing the effectiveness of dictionary attacks:

http://freshmeat.net/projects/sshutout

I run the infrastructure for a couple of small companies. I use PowerWare 9120 fully online UPS's that can power the rack of 5 servers and misc routers, firewalls, whatnot for about an hour. For around $6K I had a Generac emergency auto-failover generator installed which has worked flawlessly. Power goes about for about 45 seconds and I'm back online with full power.

When running on a smallish generator there are some things you need to know. You'll need fully online UPS's. The cheap consumer grade ones you buy at Best Buy probably won't cut it. Here's some more info: http://yml.com/fv-b-1-71/Generac-Guardian-Emergency-Standby-Generator.html

Power went out around here about 3 hours ago due to high winds. The generac guardian propane generator kicked in automatically within 45 seconds and the entire house, including furnace, coffee maker, the server racks, both T1's, etc is operational. On 2 100 gallon propane tanks I've run the entire operation for up to 4 days. I cannot tell you how much this rocks.

I think I'll pour myself another cup of coffee. :)

All told the installed cost was about $5K including all the wiring, gas hookups, breaker panel and moving 12 of the house circuits over to the generator backed panel. The entire installation took only about 5 hours. I did, however, have existing propane tanks.

The generator, on propane, can put out 15Kw which is plenty to run a house even in the middle of a Washington DC summer with the AC running.

It senses commercial power and automatically starts the generator, which takes about 45 seconds all told to come online, and then switches the house over to generator power. Once commercial power comes back, the system switches to it and shuts down the generator after a cooldown period.

The generator runs a selftest for 12 minutes once a week.

More info:

http://yml.com/homepage.html?article_id=71