VPS Guide: Your Go-To for VPS, Ubuntu & Command Line Success

Set Up Fail2ban with Recidive on Ubuntu

Category: VPS Setup

Enable Fail2ban’s recidive jail on Ubuntu to ban repeat offenders—install with

apt install fail2ban

then edit /etc/fail2ban/jail local with

nano /etc/fail2ban/jail.local

[recidive]\nenabled = true\nfilter = recidive\nlogpath = /var/log/fail2ban.log\nmaxretry = 5\nfindtime = 86400\nbantime = 604800

Restart with

systemctl restart fail2ban

ensure SSH is open with

ufw allow 22

This bans IPs for 7 days (604800s) if banned 5 times in 24 hours (86400s)—check with

fail2ban-client status recidive

On Linode it protects MySQL and FTP uptime—test with repeated SSH fails expecting long-term bans in /var/log/fail2ban log