Re: [Fail2ban-users] meaning of reinittime and maxreinits

[Yaroslav H. <li...@on...>]

Hi Andrew,

Indeed description could be more descriptive... Bad me (I believe I was
the source of all this reinit business). I will add clarification into
README.Debian and Cyril is welcome to adjust the description in config
file and/or README.

The purpose of "reinit" is to deal with external (not introduced
by fail2ban) modifications of the firewall rules. Possible test case:
while running fail2ban you reinitialize your iptables rules
(/etc/init.d/firehol restart or smth like that), In that case all
modifications in firewall tables introduced by fail2ban might get lost
and that is why commands like fwban, fwunban or fwcheck might fail. To
fix the situation reinitialization of  fail2ban part of firewall rules
(eg fwstart, etc) is necessary.

If reinitializations follow to closely in time (more often that
once reinittime) or there have been more than maxreinits of them,
fail2ban will quit since the situation has gone out of its control --
some other external means (self-defensive firewall, drunk sysadmin,
stuck "up-enter" key, bad weather) forbids fail2ban from executing
normally.

This "reinit" business serves as a fix for a few filed bugs against
fail2ban. So if you think that the causes I have just described
are not common to the users, you are wrong ;-)

I hope this email clarifies your confusion and gives a novel meaning to
the description in the config file. You are more than welcome to provide
your version of the description and it might be accepted at least to the
Debian fail2ban package ;-)

Cheers
-- 
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