Fail2Ban / News: Recent posts

First of all: Hi! This is Arturo 'Buanzo' Busleiman. I joined the fail2ban development team a couple weeks ago, to try and fix some bugs. Apparently, I've succeeded. So, with permission of Cyril, I give you.... fail2ban 0.8.4! [1]

We have both bugfixes AND new features to introduce. 0.8.4 is the first fail2ban release to work with Python 2.6. You will never see the infamous "unexpected communication problem" error message anymore (we hope). Additionally, the logging subsystem is now shutdown when it really is not needed anymore, which fixes the "cannot release un-acquired lock" issue. Christos Psonis assisted in fixing the maxretry/findtime rate problem (thank you, Christos!).... read more

Here is a new release of fail2ban [1]. 0.8.3 should fix the famous "Unknown error 514" and the wrong PID in fail2ban.pid. There are a few more fixes and improvements. I have not yet applied all the patches I received. This will be done in a next release.

As always, do not forget to visit the website [2] and contribute to the documentation.

Many thanks to everyone who contributed to this release. ... read more

More than 6 months since the last release, 0.8.2 is finally out [1]. This one contains a lot of fixes and new features. So I hope we have not introduced to many bugs. Here are the most important things introduced in 0.8.2:

- Added "full line failregex". It is now possible to match a whole line. This should avoid deny of service attacks against fail2ban. Currently only sshd.conf uses this feature. Thanks to Yaroslav Halchenko.... read more

Fail2Ban monitors log files like /var/log/pwdfail or /var/log/apache/error_log and bans failure-prone addresses. It updates firewall rules to reject the IP address or executes user defined commands.

This new release fixes some security issues in the default configuration files and includes new filters and actions. The "mail" actions are now deprecated and should be replaced with "sendmail" actions. fail2ban-regex now accepts "ignoreregex".... read more

I'm proud to announce the release of Fail2ban 0.8.0. This is the first release of the new stable branch. The development of this release has taken about a year and is almost a complete rewrite from 0.6. A lot of new features have been added. Here are some of them:

- client/server architecture
- multithreading support
- better configuration
- date format autodetection
- Gamin support
- better documentation and website
- support for more services... read more

Here is a new release candidate. Yaroslav Halchenko fixed a bug in the "reload" command causing Fail2ban to hang. Many thanks to him. There are a few other small fixes and improvements.

The complete list of changes is available in the CHANGELOG.

Fail2ban has a new domain name. You can now find the wiki, nightly snapshots, downloads at http://www.fail2ban.org.

Please, do not hesitate to contribute, discuss or edit the wiki. The best way to see what changed on the wiki is to look at: ... read more

Here is a new release candidate. A bug in the date detector has been fixed and a few new filters/actions have been added. 0.8 is quite close now.

The complete list of changes is available in the CHANGELOG.

Fail2ban has a new domain name. You can now find the wiki, nightly snapshots, downloads at http://www.fail2ban.org.

Please, do not hesitate to contribute, discuss or edit the wiki. The best way to see what changed on the wiki is to look at: ... read more

I'm proud to announce the release of the version 0.7.7 of Fail2ban, the first and hopefully the only release candidate. There is almost no bug fixes in this release. Here is a short summary of the changes:

1) fail2ban-regex has been completely rewritten and can now accept both log file and filter file. This should help testing regular expressions.
2) Cacti template and script in order to graph failed and banned hits.
3) some new filter and action scripts.
4) fail2ban-client status <jail> now display the currently banned IP addresses.... read more

Here is a new beta release of Fail2ban. This version is still considered as beta because two important changes appear in this release:

1) The installation directory moved from /usr/lib/fail2ban to /usr/share/fail2ban
2) "failregex" and "ignoreregex" now support multiple regular expressions

This release contains a few minor bug fixes too. Please look at the CHANGELOG for a more complete list of changes.... read more

This new release fix a few bugs and a vulnerability (CVE-2006-6302). The new "locale" option should help user with bug #1457620. Please do not forget to update your configuration file in order to fix CVE-2006-6302.

All users should upgrade to this version.

Notice that the Debian package is not affected by this security issue.

CVE-2006-6302: http://www.frsirt.com/english/advisories/2006/4877
Homepage: http://fail2ban.sourceforge.net

Here is a new beta release of Fail2ban. This version contains mostly bug fixes. A new option "ignoreregex" has been added. Please look at the CHANGELOG for a more complete list of changes.

This version seems to be quite stable. The next releases should be release candidates.

Yaroslav Halchenko who maintains the Debian package of Fail2ban is now an official Debian Maintainer. Congratulations and many thanks to him for his work on Fail2ban.... read more

Here is a new beta release of Fail2ban. This version adds more actions, filters and date templates. There is quite a lot of bug fixes and small improvements. Please look at the ChangeLog for a more complete list of changes.

Fail2ban 0.7.4 contains all the major features for 0.8. I need more feedback and bug reports. So please, test it ;)

Manual: http://fail2ban.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/MANUAL_0_8
Howto: http://fail2ban.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/HOWTO_fail2ban_0.7.x
Homepage: http://fail2ban.sourceforge.net

Two major features were added in this release. Fail2ban takes now advantage of Gamin if available. Now "logpath" supports wildcards which allow several files to be monitored by one jail. Please look at the ChangeLog for a more complete list of changes.

Fail2ban 0.7.3 contains all the major features for 0.8. I need feedback and bug reports. So please, test it ;)

Howto: http://fail2ban.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/HOWTO_fail2ban_0.7.x
Homepage: http://fail2ban.sourceforge.net

Here is a new development release with pretty much improvements. A date detector is now available and "timeregex" and "timepattern" are no more required. An interactive mode and a new tool, fail2ban-regex, have been added. Please look at the ChangeLog for a more complete list of changes.

Fail2ban 0.7.2 is considered beta software. I need feedback and bug reports. So please, test it ;)... read more

A few critical bugs were found in 0.7.0. This release should fix them.

Fail2ban 0.7.1 is considered alpha software. I need feedback and bug reports. So please, test it ;)

Howto: http://fail2ban.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/HOWTO_fail2ban_0.7.x
Homepage: http://fail2ban.sourceforge.net

Here is the first release of the newly 0.7.x branch. This is almost a complete rewrite of Fail2ban with multithreading, client/server, better configuration files, etc. There is still a lot of work before 0.8.0 but it should already run correctly.

Fail2ban 0.7.0 is considered alpha software. I need feedback and bug reports. So please, test it ;)

Howto: http://fail2ban.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/HOWTO_fail2ban_0.7.x
Homepage: http://fail2ban.sourceforge.net

Fail2ban 0.6.1 is out. It contains a few bug fixes and some new features. Have a look at the changelog file for more details. We are now working on a new version with a lot of new features.

fail2ban-0.6.1 is the current stable version. It has been well tested and should not contain severe bugs.

Homepage: http://fail2ban.sourceforge.net

More than 6 months after the first 0.4.x version, a new stable release is available. New features include mail notification, firewall rules in config file, no more log4py dependency, bug fixes, etc. Have a look at the changelog. Many thanks to Yaroslav Halchenko who did a lot of work for this release.

Please do not forget to remove your previous 0.4.x installation before upgrading to 0.6.0 and update your configuration file. ... read more

I planned a stable release for september. However, we decided to fix some issues before 0.6. Have a look at the changelog for more informations. I will not promise anymore that this is the last one before stable ;-) Please test it and report any problem. Many thanks to Yaroslav Halchenko who did most of the changes found in this release.

Please do not forget to remove your previous 0.4.x version before upgrading to 0.5.x and update your configuration file. ... read more

Less than a week after the version 0.5.3, I release 0.5.4 with new features introduced by Debian maintainer, Yaroslav Halchenko. There is too many changes to release directly a stable version.

Please do not forget to remove your previous 0.4.x version before upgrading to 0.5.x and update your configuration file.

fail2ban-0.5.4 is still an unstable version but should work perfectly.

Homepage: http://fail2ban.sourceforge.net

This release fixes bugs discovered in 0.5.x. I hope bug #1256075 is fixed now. This release should be the latest before stable.

Please do not forget to remove your previous 0.4.x version before upgrading to 0.5.x and update your configuration file.

fail2ban-0.5.3 is still an unstable version but should work perfectly.

Homepage: http://fail2ban.sourceforge.net

This release fixes bugs discovered in 0.5.x and remove the log4py dependancy. Basic man pages are available.

Please do not forget to remove your previous 0.4.x version before upgrading to 0.5.x and update your configuration file.

fail2ban-0.5.2 is still an unstable version but should work perfectly. I hope this one will be the last before stable.

Homepage: http://fail2ban.sourceforge.net

This release fixes bugs discovered in 0.5.0 and add multi targets for the log output including syslog. Default config creates an iptables chain for each section.

Please do not forget to remove your previous 0.4.x version before upgrading to 0.5.x and update your configuration file.

fail2ban-0.5.1 is still an unstable version but should work perfectly.

Homepage: http://fail2ban.sourceforge.net

This is a development release. A lot of new features are available (mail notification, CIDR support, firewall rules configuration, etc). Please test this version and report any bugs in order to make it stable as soon as possible.

Homepage: http://fail2ban.sourceforge.net

This revision contains only a bug fix in textToDNS and a more readable configuration file. A initd script for Gentoo is also available.

I would really appreciate initd scripts for others distributions.

Homepage: http://fail2ban.sourceforge.net