#1006868 fail2ban: New install of fail2ban does not start because of default jail.conf rules

Package:
fail2ban
Source:
fail2ban
Submitter:
Liz Billiau
Date:
2022-03-07 05:48:04 UTC
Severity:
important
#1006868#5
Date:
2022-03-07 04:40:00 UTC
From:
To:
Dear Maintainer,

*** Reporter, please consider answering these questions, where appropriate ***

   * What led up to the situation?
New install of fail2ban
   * What exactly did you do (or not do) that was effective (or
     ineffective)?
Following the instructions I copied jail.conf to jail.local and edited jail.local for my configuration
   * What was the outcome of this action?
Fail2ban would not start due to missing log files, for packages which were not installed and would not be. These were not in my jail.local file, and I solved this by renaming jail.conf to jail.conf~ . Then I was able to start fail2ban through systemd.
   * What outcome did you expect instead?
I expected that jail.local would be my configuration file, and that the edits I made there would be the necessary edits to run fail2ban.
My suggestion is that the jail.conf has every possible jail commented out, and a user uncomments the required jails. There are SIX webmail and groupware servers all with jails that will try to start on a default installation. Likewise there are 5 ftp servers and multiple mail servers, when it is usual to have just one.