JAIL.CONF(5) Fail2Ban Configuration JAIL.CONF(5) NAME jail.conf - configuration for the fail2ban server SYNOPSIS fail2ban.conf fail2ban.d/*.conf fail2ban.local fail2ban.d/*.local jail.conf jail.d/*.conf jail.local jail.d/*.local action.d/*.conf action.d/*.local action.d/*.py filter.d/*.conf filter.d/*.local DESCRIPTION Fail2ban has four configuration file types: fail2ban.conf Fail2Ban global configuration (such as logging) filter.d/*.conf Filters specifying how to detect authentication failures action.d/*.conf Actions defining the commands for banning and unbanning of IP address jail.conf Jails defining combinations of Filters with Actions. CONFIGURATION FILES FORMAT *.conf files are distributed by Fail2Ban. It is recommended that *.conf files should remain unchanged to ease upgrades. If needed, customizations should be provided in *.local files. For example, if you would like to enable the [ssh-iptables-ipset] jail specified in jail.conf, create jail.local containing jail.local [ssh-iptables-ipset] enabled = true In .local files specify only the settings you would like to change and the rest of the configuration will then come from the corresponding .conf file which is parsed first. jail.d/ and fail2ban.d/ In addition to .local, for jail.conf or fail2ban.conf file there can be a corresponding .d/ directory containing additional .conf files. The order e.g. for jail configuration would be: jail.conf jail.d/*.conf (in alphabetical order) jail.local jail.d/*.local (in alphabetical order). i.e. all .local files are parsed after .conf files in the original configuration file and files under .d directory. Settings in the file parsed later take precedence over identical entries in previously parsed files. Files are ordered alphabetically, e.g. fail2ban.d/01_custom_log.conf - to use a different log path jail.d/01_enable.conf - to enable a specific jail jail.d/02_custom_port.conf - to change the port(s) of a jail. Configuration files have sections, those specified with [section name], and name = value pairs. For those name items that can accept multiple values, specify the values separated by spaces, or in separate lines space indented at the beginning of the line before the second value. Configuration files can include other (defining common variables) configuration files, which is often used in Filters and Actions. Such inclusions are defined in a section called [INCLUDES]: before indicates that the specified file is to be parsed before the current file. after indicates that the specified file is to be parsed after the current file. Using Python "string interpolation" mechanisms, other definitions are allowed and can later be used within other definitions as %(name)s. Fail2ban has more advanced syntax (similar python extended interpolation). This extended interpolation is using %(section/parameter)s to denote a value from a foreign section. Besides cross section interpolation the value of parameter in [DEFAULT] section can be retrieved with %(default/parameter)s. Fail2ban supports also another feature named %(known/parameter)s (means last known option with name parameter). This interpolation makes possible to extend a stock filter or jail regexp in .local file (opposite to simply set failregex/ignoreregex that overwrites it), e.g. baduseragents = IE|wget|%(my-settings/baduseragents)s failregex = %(known/failregex)s useragent=%(baduseragents)s Additionally to interpolation %(known/parameter)s, that does not works for filter/action init parameters, an interpolation tag can be used (means last known init definition of filters or actions with name parameter). This interpolation makes possible to extend a parameters of stock filter or action directly in jail inside jail.conf/jail.local file without creating a separately filter.d/*.local file, e.g. # filter.d/test.conf: [Init] test.method = GET baduseragents = IE|wget [Definition] failregex = ^%(__prefix_line)\s+""\s+test\s+regexp\s+-\s+useragent=(?:) # jail.local: [test] # use filter "test", overwrite method to "POST" and extend known bad agents with "badagent": filter = test[test.method=POST, baduseragents="badagent|"] Comments: use '#' for comment lines and '; ' (space is important) for inline comments. FAIL2BAN CONFIGURATION FILE(S) (fail2ban.conf) The items that can be set in section [Definition] are: loglevel verbosity level of log output: CRITICAL, ERROR, WARNING, NOTICE, INFO, DEBUG, TRACEDEBUG, HEAVYDEBUG or corresponding numeric value (50-5). Default: INFO (equal 20) logtarget log target: filename, SYSLOG, STDERR or STDOUT. Default: STDOUT if not set in fail2ban.conf/fail2ban.local Note. If fail2ban running as systemd-service, for logging to the systemd-journal, the logtarget could be set to STDOUT Only a single log target can be specified. If you change logtarget from the default value and you are using logrotate -- also adjust or disable rotation in the corresponding configuration file (e.g. /etc/logrotate.d/fail2ban on Debian systems). socket socket filename. Default: /var/run/fail2ban/fail2ban.sock This is used for communication with the fail2ban server daemon. Do not remove this file when Fail2ban is running. It will not be possible to communicate with the server afterwards. pidfile PID filename. Default: /var/run/fail2ban/fail2ban.pid This is used to store the process ID of the fail2ban server. allowipv6 option to allow IPv6 interface - auto, yes (on, true, 1) or no (off, false, 0). Default: auto This value can be used to declare fail2ban whether IPv6 is allowed or not. dbfile Database filename. Default: /var/lib/fail2ban/fail2ban.sqlite3 This defines where the persistent data for fail2ban is stored. This persistent data allows bans to be reinstated and continue reading log files from the last read position when fail2ban is restarted. A value of None disables this feature. dbmaxmatches Max number of matches stored in database per ticket. Default: 10 This option sets the max number of matched log-lines could be stored per ticket in the database. This also affects values resolvable via tags and in actions. dbpurgeage Database purge age in seconds. Default: 86400 (24hours) This sets the age at which bans should be purged from the database. The config parameters of section [Thread] are: stacksize Stack size of each thread in fail2ban. Default: 0 (platform or configured default) This specifies the stack size (in KiB) to be used for subsequently created threads, and must be 0 or a positive integer value of at least 32. JAIL CONFIGURATION FILE(S) (jail.conf) The following options are applicable to any jail. They appear in a section specifying the jail name or in the [DEFAULT] section which defines default values to be used if not specified in the individual section. filter name of the filter -- filename of the filter in /etc/fail2ban/filter.d/ without the .conf/.local extension. Only one filter can be specified. logpath filename(s) of the log files to be monitored, separated by new lines. Globs -- paths containing * and ? or [0-9] -- can be used however only the files that exist at start up matching this glob pattern will be considered. Optional space separated option 'tail' can be added to the end of the path to cause the log file to be read from the end, else default 'head' option reads file from the beginning Ensure syslog or the program that generates the log file isn't configured to compress repeated log messages to "*last message repeated 5 time*s" otherwise it will fail to detect. This is called RepeatedMsgReduction in rsyslog and should be Off. logencoding encoding of log files used for decoding. Default value of "auto" uses current system locale. logtimezone Force the time zone for log lines that don't have one. If this option is not specified, log lines from which no explicit time zone has been found are interpreted by fail2ban in its own system time zone, and that may turn to be inappropriate. While the best practice is to configure the monitored applications to include explicit offsets, this option is meant to handle cases where that is not possible. The supported time zones in this option are those with fixed offset: Z, UTC[+-]hhmm (you can also use GMT as an alias to UTC). This option has no effect on log lines on which an explicit time zone has been found. Examples: logtimezone = UTC logtimezone = UTC+0200 logtimezone = GMT-0100 banaction banning action (default iptables-multiport) typically specified in the [DEFAULT] section for all jails. This parameter will be used by the standard substitution of action and can be redefined central in the [DEFAULT] section inside jail.local (to apply it to all jails at once) or separately in each jail, where this substitution will be used. banaction_allports the same as banaction but for some "allports" jails like "pam- generic" or "recidive" (default iptables-allports). action action(s) from /etc/fail2ban/action.d/ without the .conf/.local extension. Arguments can be passed to actions to override the default values from the [Init] section in the action file. Arguments are specified by: [name=value,name2=value,name3="values,values"] Values can also be quoted (required when value includes a ","). More that one action can be specified (in separate lines). ignoreself boolean value (default true) indicates the banning of own IP addresses should be prevented ignoreip list of IPs not to ban. They can include a DNS resp. CIDR mask too. The option affects additionally to ignoreself (if true) and don't need to contain own DNS resp. IPs of the running host. ignorecommand command that is executed to determine if the current candidate IP for banning (or failure-ID for raw IDs) should not be banned. This option operates alongside the ignoreself and ignoreip options. It is executed first, only if neither ignoreself nor ignoreip match the criteria. IP will not be banned if command returns successfully (exit code 0). Like ACTION FILES, tags like are can be included in the ignorecommand value and will be substituted before execution. ignorecache provide cache parameters (default disabled) for ignore failure check (caching of the result from ignoreip, ignoreself and ignorecommand), syntax: ignorecache = key="@", max-count=100, max-time=5m ignorecommand = if [ "" = "technical" ] && [ "" = "my-host.example.com" ]; then exit 0; fi; exit 1 This will cache the result of ignorecommand (does not call it repeatedly) for 5 minutes (cache time) for maximal 100 entries (cache size), using values substituted like "user@host" as cache-keys. Set option ignorecache to empty value disables the cache. bantime effective ban duration (in seconds or time abbreviation format). findtime time interval (in seconds or time abbreviation format) before the current time where failures will count towards a ban. maxretry number of failures that have to occur in the last findtime seconds to ban the IP. backend backend to be used to detect changes in the logpath. It defaults to "auto" which will try "pyinotify", "systemd" before "polling". Any of these can be specified. "pyinotify" is only valid on Linux systems with the "pyinotify" Python libraries. usedns use DNS to resolve HOST names that appear in the logs. By default it is "warn" which will resolve hostnames to IPs however it will also log a warning. If you are using DNS here you could be blocking the wrong IPs due to the asymmetric nature of reverse DNS (that the application used to write the domain name to log) compared to forward DNS that fail2ban uses to resolve this back to an IP (but not necessarily the same one). Ideally you should configure your applications to log a real IP. This can be set to "yes" to prevent warnings in the log or "no" to disable DNS resolution altogether (thus ignoring entries where hostname, not an IP is logged).. prefregex regex (Python regular expression) to parse a common part containing in every message (see prefregex in section FILTER FILES for details). failregex regex (Python regular expression) to be added to the filter's failregexes (see failregex in section FILTER FILES for details). If this is useful for others using your application please share you regular expression with the fail2ban developers by reporting an issue (see REPORTING BUGS below). ignoreregex regex which, if the log line matches, would cause Fail2Ban not consider that line. This line will be ignored even if it matches a failregex of the jail or any of its filters. maxmatches max number of matched log-lines the jail would hold in memory per ticket. By default it is the same value as maxretry of jail (or default). This option also affects values resolvable via tag in actions. Backends Available options are listed below. pyinotify requires pyinotify (a file alteration monitor) to be installed. If pyinotify is not installed, Fail2ban will use auto. polling uses a polling algorithm which does not require external libraries. systemd uses systemd python library to access the systemd journal. Specifying logpath is not valid for this backend and instead utilises journalmatch from the jails associated filter config. Multiple systemd-specific flags can be passed to the backend, including journalpath and journalfiles, to explicitly set the path to a directory or set of files. journalflags, which by default is 4 and excludes user session files, can be set to include them with journalflags=1, see the python-systemd documentation for other settings and further details. Examples: backend = systemd[journalpath=/run/log/journal/machine-1] backend = systemd[journalfiles="/path/to/system.journal, /path/to/user.journal"] backend = systemd[journalflags=1] Actions Each jail can be configured with only a single filter, but may have multiple actions. By default, the name of a action is the action filename, and in the case of Python actions, the ".py" file extension is stripped. Where multiple of the same action are to be used, the actname option can be assigned to the action to avoid duplication e.g.: [ssh-iptables-ipset] enabled = true action = smtp.py[dest=chris@example.com, actname=smtp-chris] smtp.py[dest=sally@example.com, actname=smtp-sally] TIME ABBREVIATION FORMAT The time entries in fail2ban configuration (like findtime or bantime) can be provided as integer in seconds or as string using special abbreviation format (e. g. 600 is the same as 10m). Abbreviation tokens: years?, yea?, yy? months?, mon? weeks?, wee?, ww? days?, da, dd? hours?, hou?, hh? minutes?, min?, mm? seconds?, sec?, ss? The question mark (?) means the optional character, so day as well as days can be used. You can combine multiple tokens in format (separated with space resp. without separator), e. g.: 1y 6mo or 1d12h30m. Note that tokens m as well as mm means minutes, for month use abbreviation mo or mon. The time format can be tested using fail2ban-client: fail2ban-client --str2sec 1d12h ACTION CONFIGURATION FILES (action.d/*.conf) Action files specify which commands are executed to ban and unban an IP address. Like with jail.conf files, if you desire local changes create an [actionname].local file in the /etc/fail2ban/action.d directory and override the required settings. Action files have two sections, Definition and Init . The [Init] section enables action-specific settings. In jail.conf/jail.local these can be overridden for a particular jail as options of the action's specification in that jail. The following commands can be present in the [Definition] section. actionstart command(s) executed when the jail starts. actionstop command(s) executed when the jail stops. actioncheck command(s) ran before any other action. It aims to verify if the environment is still ok. actionban command(s) that bans the IP address after maxretry log lines matches within last findtime seconds. actionunban command(s) that unbans the IP address after bantime. The [Init] section allows for action-specific settings. In jail.conf/jail.local these can be overwritten for a particular jail as options to the jail. The following are special tags which can be set in the [Init] section: timeout The maximum period of time in seconds that a command can executed, before being killed. Commands specified in the [Definition] section are executed through a system shell so shell redirection and process control is allowed. The commands should return 0, otherwise error would be logged. Moreover if actioncheck exits with non-0 status, it is taken as indication that firewall status has changed and fail2ban needs to reinitialize itself (i.e. issue actionstop and actionstart commands). Tags are enclosed in <>. All the elements of [Init] are tags that are replaced in all action commands. Tags can be added by the fail2ban-client using the "set action " command.
is a tag that is always a new line (\n). More than a single command is allowed to be specified. Each command needs to be on a separate line and indented with whitespace(s) without blank lines. The following example defines two commands to be executed. actionban = iptables -I fail2ban- --source -j DROP echo ip=, match=, time=