Skip to main content

Raymii.org Raymii.org Logo

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
Home | About | All pages | Cluster Status | RSS Feed

Stopping fail2ban.server : ERROR Unexpected communication error and other errors in fail2ban on ubuntu 9.04

Published: 23-06-2011 | Author: Remy van Elst | Text only version of this article


❗ This post is over twelve years old. It may no longer be up to date. Opinions may have changed.

While running my ssh server with Fail2ban, I decided to take a look in the log files to see if everything was working. It was not.

Recently I removed all Google Ads from this site due to their invasive tracking, as well as Google Analytics. Please, if you found this content useful, consider a small donation using any of the options below:

I'm developing an open source monitoring app called Leaf Node Monitoring, for windows, linux & android. Go check it out!

Consider sponsoring me on Github. It means the world to me if you show your appreciation and you'll help pay the server costs.

You can also sponsor me by getting a Digital Ocean VPS. With this referral link you'll get $100 credit for 60 days.

Here is the solution to stop errors like: fail2ban.server : ERROR Unexpected communication error on ubuntu 9.04 with Fail2ban from the repo's.

First we need to install python2.5 because Ubuntu 9.04 has 2.6:

sudo apt-get install python2.5

Confirm with Y where needed.

Now, we need to edit the fail2ban binary so that it makes use of python2.5:

sudo gedit /usr/bin/fail2ban-server

Change the first line ( #!/usr/bin/python ) to the following:

#!/usr/bin/python2.5

Save and close the file.

Now restart the fail2ban service. Note: sudo /etc/init.d/fail2ban restart did not work for me, so I did the following:

sudo /etc/init.d/fail2ban stop
sudo /etc/init.d/fail2ban start

And If you check the log files now ( vim /var/log/fail2ban.log ) you will not see the error anymore.

Tags: fail2ban , python , tutorials , ubuntu