How should I approach the issue that bans do not persist after ending the monerod process?

Question

I've been manually banning peers that are (a) clogging up my logs and (b) taking away space that would otherwise be used for legitimate in_peer connections (which I have limited for data usage reasons). It is a little time consuming, but it's fine. It does the job.

I didn't realize that closing monerod would discard that ban list. My logs had been clearing up, and then I had to briefly shut down monerod. Now I've got a sea of bad peers to manually ban again.

1. Is there a way to make the ban list persist?
2. If not within monerod, what might another (simple) strategy be to "preserve" that state?
3. Am I stuck having to write some script to detect IPs for auto-banning according to my rules? Perhaps by parsing the daemon log and sending a ban RPC command to the daemon?

I like the idea of learning new things, so if #3 is required, then so be it. I just don't want to overcomplicate things if I don't have to.

Answer 1

1) Not that I know of.

2) & 3) One way would be to make use of the built-in monerod commands and a little scripting. E.g.

monerod bans | awk  'NR>2 {print $1}' > bans.txt

Gets a list of any currently banned IPs. After you have restarted monerod, you could then:

cat bans.txt | while read ip; do monerod ban "$ip"; done

Which will re-ban them all.

If you want to permanently ban them though, I would add them to your firewall instead. I.e. block via iptables rules.