My first clue that Fail2Ban wasn’t working right: it wasn’t showing up in iptables -L.
Chain INPUT (policy ACCEPT)
target prot opt source destination
fail2ban-ssh tcp -- anywhere anywhere tcp dpt:ssh
Chain fail2ban-ssh (1 references)
target prot opt source destination
RETURN all -- anywhere anywhere

My second clue: Fail2Ban wasn’t displaying the configuration I thought it had loaded. For example, my list of “ignoreips” wasn’t showing up when I tried to view it. Or it didn’t return the maxretry settings I had configured.

I tracked it down back to jail.local and determined that the SSH parser wasn’t actually enabled. So I uncommented the line and enabled it to “true”.
[ssh-iptables]
#enabled = false
enabled = true
filter = sshd

I also had to change it to look at the SSH log, which in CentOS is in /var/log/secure
logpath = /var/log/secure

Reloaded the config and checked the status of the daemon.
fail2ban-client reload
fail2ban-client status

Running properly, Fail2Ban creates a jail named ssh-iptables.

The only disappointment is that Fail2Ban does not ban retroactively. It only reviews new entries to determine bannable IPs.

The Fail2Ban command list helped me troubleshoot Fail2Ban. Running in interactive mode helped a great deal.

Why was I getting “Failed to connect to FTP Server” messages when trying to upgrade a plugin through the backend FTP interface? Well, apparently it wasn’t liking the ftp.domain.com for hostname. So I used “localhost”, and it worked!

Or what I learned after reading the logs of brute force attacks on our server.

The logs issued by the Logwatch daemon on our server weren’t pretty…they told a grim tale of the attacks that besieged our server daily. I resolved to do something about it

• Securing SSH, a handy guide on the options
• Summarizing the options of securing SSH on CentOS
• A HowTo setup
• Installing Fail2Ban on CentOS by a hosting company
• Installed Fail2Ban

Fail2ban proved to be an easy install. I just followed the instructions on the 2nd link given, ensuring that I configured a local jail.conf file to store my settings in. I’m not entirely clear on how to read/parse CIDR addresses, but I think I got it right regardless. One thing to remember that’s not listed here is to turn on iptables, if it isn’t already.

# /etc/init.d/iptables start

Now I have to determine if I can tie Fail2Ban to Logwatch.