MEPIS Community Forum

Do you have your fail2ban working with mail? Is it useful without a mail server running?

to receive email notifications about blocked ips? no. you should be able to see these logged in /var/log/fail2ban.log. also, iptables -L -n will display all the iptables rules.

i think you'll find that getting mail notifications may be too much because you will notice addresses regularly being blocked by fail2ban.

open a konsole, run

sudo tail -f /var/log/fail2ban.log

OR

su -c ' tail -f /var/log/fail2ban.log'

if you don't have sudo enabled. you can leave the konsole open and this running and it will log and display data as it occurs....

the other added feature(s) of fail2ban is that it scans other log files for problems and can act upon them too. so it can help protect your system from attacks via httpd, etc.