HOWTO fail2ban 0.7.x

HowTo test the new development branch

For quite a long time now, a new branch is in development. This is almost a complete rewrite with a lot of new features and a better design. There is still a lot of work but this new branch is already functional and can be tested.

This HowTo will not delete or modify your current Fail2ban setup. You only have to turn off any previous version during the tests.

Getting the sources

There is two ways of getting the sources:

• nightly tarball
• Subversion

There is no official release of the 0.7 branch (trunk) yet. The best way for getting the sources is Subversion. The instructions are available here but here is a quick reminder:

svn co https://svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/fail2ban/trunk fail2ban-trunk

The sources are now available in the directory called fail2ban-trunk. If you decide to use the tarball, simply run:

tar xvfj fail2ban-nightly.tar.bz2

You should have a directory called fail2ban-0.7.0-SVN.

Change your current directory to fail2ban-trunk or fail2ban-0.7.0-SVN.

Setup

The configuration folder should look like this:

config/
|-- action.d
|   |-- dummy.conf
|   |-- foo.conf
|   |-- hostsdeny.conf
|   |-- iptables.conf
|   |-- mail-whois.conf
|   `-- mail.conf
|-- fail2ban.conf
|-- filter.d
|   |-- apache-auth.conf
|   |-- sshd.conf
|   `-- vsftpd.conf
`-- jail.conf

The most important file is probably jail.conf. It contains the definition of your jails. A jails is the combination of one filter and one or several actions.

To be continued...