Essential System Utilities is a series of articles highlighting essential system tools. These are small utilities, useful for system administrators as well as regular users of Linux based systems.
The series examines both graphical and text based open source utilities. For details of all tools in this series, please check the table at the bottom.
This article looks at Fail2ban, a daemon to ban hosts that cause multiple authentication errors. Fail2ban is free and open source software.
Installation
The specific commands to install Fail2ban are distro-specific. On our Ubuntu systems, we installed the software by typing the following commands at a shell:
$ sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y
$ sudo apt install fail2ban
fail2ban.conf contains the default configuration profile. The default settings provide a reasonable working setup.
The only required dependency needed to run Fail2ban is Python.
Next page: Page 2 – In Operation
Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction / Installation
Page 2 – In Operation
Page 3 – Summary
Complete list of articles in this series:
| Essential System Tools | |
|---|---|
| ps_mem | Accurate reporting of software's memory consumption |
| gtop | System monitoring dashboard |
| pet | Simple command-line snippet manager |
| Alacritty | Innovative, hardware-accelerated terminal emulator |
| inxi | Command-line system information tool that's a time-saver for everyone |
| BleachBit | System cleaning software. Quick and easy way to service your computer |
| catfish | Versatile file searching software |
| journalctl | Query and display messages from the journal |
| Nmap | Network security tool that builds a "map" of the network |
| ddrescue | Data recovery tool, retrieving data from failing drives as safely as possible |
| Neofetch | System information tool written in Bash |
| Timeshift | Similar to Windows' System Restore functionality, Time Machine Tool in Mac OS |
| GParted | Resize, copy, and move partitions without data |
| Clonezilla | Partition and disk cloning software |
| fdupes | Find or delete duplicate files |
| Krusader | Advanced, twin-panel (commander-style) file manager |
| nmon | Systems administrator, tuner, and benchmark tool |
| f3 | Detect and fix counterfeit flash storage |
| QJournalctl | Graphical User Interface for systemd’s journalctl |
| QDirStat | Qt-based directory statistics |
| Firejail | Restrict the running environment of untrusted applications |
| VeraCrypt | Strong disk encryption software |
| Unison | Console and graphical file synchronization software |
| hyperfine | Command-line benchmarking tool |
| TLP | Must-have tool for anyone running Linux on a notebook |
| nnn | Portable terminal file manager that's amazingly frugal |
| Glances | Cross-platform system monitoring tool written in Python |
| CPU-X | System profiler with both a GUI and text-based |
| Ventoy | Create bootable USB drive for ISO/WIM/IMG/VHD(x)/EFI files |
| Fail2ban | Ban hosts that cause multiple authentication errors |
| dust | More intuitive version of du written in Rust |
| Pingnoo | Graphical representation for traceroute and ping output |