How To Install Fail2Ban on Ubuntu

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install and configuration of Fail2Ban on your Ubuntu server. For those of you who didn’t know, Fail2Ban is a utility that is used to detect and prevent brute force intrusion. By scanning logs for certain actions, such as repeated failed login attempts, Fail2Ban is able to alter firewall configurations to halt further events.

This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation Fail2Ban on Ubuntu.

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: Ubuntu and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint.
• It’s recommended that you use a fresh OS install to prevent any potential issues.
• SSH access to the server (or just open Terminal if you’re on a desktop).
• A non-root sudo user or access to the root user. We recommend acting as a non-root sudo user, however, as you can harm your system if you’re not careful when acting as the root.

Install Fail2Ban on Ubuntu

Step 1. First, log in as a root user and enter the following command to install Fail2ban.

sudo apt-get install fail2ban

Step 2. Once that has finished, go ahead and create your “local” jail (this is where you define your overrides of jail.conf). You can read more about jails here.

cp /etc/fail2ban/jail.conf /etc/fail2ban/jail.local

Step 3. Setup Fail2ban default configuration.

nano /etc/fail2ban/jail.local

Now, you will see the default section with some basic rules that are followed by fail2ban itself. If you want to add some extra layer of protection to your server, then you can customize each rule section as per your needs. There are a few lines that act as a basic setup you can edit as necessary to suit your need including: ignoreip, bantime, findtime, and maxretry. You can read what each line means in the explanation available there.

[DEFAULT]

# "ignoreip" can be an IP address, a CIDR mask or a DNS host. Fail2ban will not
# ban a host which matches an address in this list. Several addresses can be
# defined using space separator.
ignoreip = 127.0.0.1/8

# "bantime" is the number of seconds that a host is banned.
bantime = 600

# A host is banned if it has generated "maxretry" during the last "findtime"
# seconds.
findtime = 600
maxretry = 3

# Destination email address used solely for the interpolations in
# jail.{conf,local} configuration files.
destemail = root@localhost

Step 4. Restarting Fail2Ban service.

service fail2ban restart

Congratulations! You have successfully installed Fail2Ban. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing Fail2Ban on the Linux Ubuntu system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you check the official Fail2Ban website.

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