Fail2Ban starting 200/error on Ubuntu 10.04 or older^edit

20 Apr 2015

2 mins

If you get this sudden error in the fail2ban.log

2015-04-20 11:13:17,722 fail2ban.jail   : INFO   Jail 'apache-honeypot' started
2015-04-20 11:13:17,739 fail2ban.actions.action: ERROR  iptables -N fail2ban-apache-honeypot
iptables -A fail2ban-apache-honeypot -j RETURN
iptables -I INPUT -p tcp -m multiport --dports apache-honeypot -j fail2ban-apache-honeypot returned 200

most likely you have spotted the character length limitation on the chain name.

I’ve discovered that the limit is 16 for the chain name length, but Fail2Ban prefixes it with fail2ban- string which eats so precious 9 characters so the only 7 remaining.

To solve this issue you need to rename the iptables action to something like name=HONEY

$ cat /etc/fail2ban/jail.conf

[apache-honeypot]
enabled  = enable
filter   = apache-honeypot
action   = iptables-allports[name=HONEY, protocol=all]
logpath  = /var/log/asterisk/full
maxretry = 3
bantime  = 600