Fail2ban: CentOS 7 Fail2ban Will Not Start

[TommyFrass]

I have tried uninstalling (yum erase) and re-installing and I am receiving

service fail2ban status
Redirecting to /bin/systemctl status fail2ban.service
fail2ban.service - Fail2ban Service
Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/system/fail2ban.service; enabled)
Active: failed (Result: start-limit) since Wed 2015-03-18 16:43:23 EDT; 1min 6s ago
Process: 4257 ExecStart=/usr/bin/fail2ban-client -x start (code=exited, status=255)

Mar 18 16:43:23 Asterisk51 systemd[1]: fail2ban.service: control process exited, code=exited status=255
Mar 18 16:43:23 Asterisk51 systemd[1]: Failed to start Fail2ban Service.
Mar 18 16:43:23 Asterisk51 systemd[1]: Unit fail2ban.service entered failed state.
Mar 18 16:43:23 Asterisk51 systemd[1]: fail2ban.service holdoff time over, scheduling restart.
Mar 18 16:43:23 Asterisk51 systemd[1]: Stopping Fail2ban Service...
Mar 18 16:43:23 Asterisk51 systemd[1]: Starting Fail2ban Service...
Mar 18 16:43:23 Asterisk51 systemd[1]: fail2ban.service start request repeated too quickly, refusing to start.
Mar 18 16:43:23 Asterisk51 systemd[1]: Failed to start Fail2ban Service.
Mar 18 16:43:23 Asterisk51 systemd[1]: Unit fail2ban.service entered failed state.
[root@Asterisk51 ~]# fail2ban-server start
2015-03-18 16:45:00,310 fail2ban.server [4290]: INFO Starting Fail2ban v0.9.1
2015-03-18 16:45:00,310 fail2ban.server [4290]: INFO Starting in daemon mode

I am at my wits end..... Any help is appreciated.

Thanks,
T

[sebres]

Have you a log from fail2ban (/var/log/fail2ban.log or configured in /etc/fail2ban.conf or .local)?

What will say following command (-v -v increased output level to debug)?

/usr/bin/fail2ban-client -v -v start

[TommyFrass]

Thanks for replying, this version (0.9.1-3) is really foreign to me. What I did was yum remove fail2ban* and removed all the fail2ban dependencies and then re-installed it (yum install fail2ban -y) and it is working now. I notice though that there is a lack of documentation for version 9 is the manual for 8 similar?

Thanks Tom

[sebres]

Yes, the manual for 9 is similar for 8 + some new features and extensions (like sqlite database, etc.)
But you should have current man for you version (or other sphinx documentation, whatever centos used).

[yarikoptic]

seems it was distribution specific and resoilved -- closing. reopen if I am wrong

[kbroughton]

In my case it was fail2ban 1.5.0 on centos7 on aws
I had a cluster of 7 nodes and on 2, cloud-init and fail2ban failed to start on a reboot.
systemctl start cloud-init worked fine.
systemctl start fail2ban gave the "repeated too quickly" error above.

running

/usr/bin/fail2ban-client -x start

gave the useful error

ERROR  There is no directory /var/run/fail2ban to contain the socket file /var/run/fail2ban/fail2ban.sock.

mkdir /var/run/fail2ban and systemctl restart then worked