Security :: CentOS 5.5 Upgrade - IPTables SSH Auto Blocking

I have a fiberoptic broadband 20MB synchronous pipe at my home. Over summer at my place of employment its pretty much dead for 3 months so when I'm not busy I play around on my home server. I have my 20mb pipe going directly into my wrt54gl, from there I have a wired connection going to my server (Centos 5.3 recently upgraded to 5.5 through updates.) It serves as a file server(Samba, SSH). My wrt54gl handles natting port 22 to my server. I have my wireless AP setup to hand out leases from .2-.20 and my server has a static of .100. Dyndns.org handles my name resolution via their free account method.

I have a Mac Pro, iMac, Macbook, and a Toshiba Laptop with 64bit 7 running off wireless along with our cell phones, and my XBOX 360 also is wired directly for the gaming speed. I use all of the computers around my home to access the samba shares via unc path for file sharing and or working on projects. I had originally planned to upgrade the wrt54gl with a cisco e3200 or an e3000 but unfortunately I've come to find out dyndns and the e lines of cisco wireless AP's dont work with dyndns and get banned. So I would have to install the daemon on my server and put it as a directly connected server to my WAN link and install a second ethernet card and pass traffic through my server for the rest of my home which I am not going to do.

All of the previous sentence because it would update dyndns with a 192.168.x.x address since its not directly connected. I use a combination of putty.exe and vnc viewer to tunnel 5900 through port 22 to my server. So from anywhere I am at I can access my screen securely and then rdp or vnc to the desktop of my local LAN computers. This allows me to only have port 22 open. I've been looking at my ssh logs and noticed I have been getting hit alot with ssh scans. I want to implement an iptables firewall on my linux machine just for the purpose of further securing port 22. I dont necessarily need natting on the iptables firewall but all I need is ssh in and out, web in, and samba out to local ip's only.

For SSH this is what I want. I want to allow SSH from any IP but if it tries to login more than 3 times in one minute I want to block that IP for a full minute before it can try 3 more attempts. I also would like log to a file but have been having issues getting that to work as well. That way when I review logs and I see that an ip tries three times and then waits a minute and tries three more, etc... I can permanently block that ip or range of ip's by adding it to the iptables script. Here is my current iptables script and it doesnt seem to be working for me. I have played with this and read for almost two weeks and still cannot get it to work correctly.

Code:
#!/bin/bash
# In order to use this iptables firewall script you must have iptables installed. You also must be using a 2.4.x series Kernel, with iptables suppport compiled into it, which is standard for most newer linux distributions.
# If you need help compiling iptables into your kernel, please see our kernel Compile/Upgrade Guide located at [URL]
# Once the script has been edited with all your relevant information (IP's Network Interfaces, etc..) simply make the script executable and run it as root.
# chmod 700 fw_rules.sh
# ./fw_rules.sh .....

# Our final trap. Everything on INPUT goes to the dropwall
# So we don't get silent drops.
$IPT -A INPUT -j dropwall