How to turn OFF MaxStartups/SourcePenalties ?

[Damien Miller]

On Sun, 13 Sep 2026, Hendrik Visage wrote:

> Good day,
> 
> Reading the manual page, I don't see how to totally turn off those
> functions as it keeps causing problems for my mass connections from
> some services that needs to do mass paralle connections over the
> latency links ;(

"PerSourcePenalties no" will turn off the per source penalties
entirely. I'd recommend that you not do this as it removes some
useful exploit mitigation measures that might save you if we ever
have another bad pre-authentication bug. I'd suggest instead turning
off the only penalties that are causing you trouble by setting
their penalty period to zero, e.g.

PerSourcePenalties authfail:0 noauth:0

Will turn off the penalties for clients that fail authentication or
never complete it.

MaxStartups cannot be turned off, but you can set a limit high enough
that you don't hit it in practice. It is used to size some one-off
allocations, so don't just don't just give it a massive number.

-d