Honeypots are definitly a good idea !

• It's a good first line defense
  (catching the probes/attacks on fake SAFE services)
• It's very informative, you can even learn from script kiddies sometimes
• <extremist mode> It's sometimes good to respond to trasher, see it as an "educative task" </extremist mode> ;-)

Although I would suggest you to avoid setting those kind of things on someone else's box.

Now, to answer to your last question :
GO ! Honeypots are fun stuff to play with for anybody interested in security.
I'm planning to setup one as soon as I manage to get a permanent Net access.
Furthermore, if you do it, I'll be very interesting to read your posts/msg about what interesting stuff you found in your logs, what problem you faced, trick your learns...


"Only Bad Coders Code Badly In Perl" (OBC2BIP)