365 Days of Code - Day 027

Mon, 16 Feb 2026 00:00:01 -0500

Following up from yesterday’s server administration, I checked on my recidive jail, and found that no clients had been banned. This was clearly an error since I could manually check the logs and see many repeat offenders. There was one change I had to make to the configuration.

ini

[recidive]
enabled = true
filter = recidive
logpath = /var/log/fail2ban.log
backend = polling # <--- Add this line
findtime = 1d
maxretry = 2
bantime = 1y

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[recidive]
enabled = true
filter = recidive
logpath = /var/log/fail2ban.log
backend = polling # <--- Add this line
findtime = 1d
maxretry = 2
bantime = 1y

By default, fail2ban was using the systemd journal to find repeat offenders, but the log is being stored in fail2ban’s own log. It was necessary to add backend = polling to the configuration to force f2b to read its own log file.

365 Days of Code - Day 026

Sun, 15 Feb 2026 00:00:01 -0500

Hardening Server Deployments: Securing GitHub Actions with Least Privilege

Fail2ban on Jim Diroff II

365 Days of Code - Day 027

365 Days of Code - Day 026