[Discuss] Fail2Ban needs some help?

[Greg Rundlett (freephile)]

I recently noticed that the Fail2Ban project is almost dead. The
homepage hasn't been updated since 2016 [1] But then I noticed that
there *is* activity on GitHub, and there is actually a new major
version out (with backward compatibility). Still, there are a large
number of pull requests, and a large number of forks [2].  Some of the
open issues include things like "Update man pages to include options
that are only found in the Changelog".

I specifically wanted to use Fail2Ban to ban aggressive web spiders
using their "Apache Bad-bots" configuration, but found that it hasn't
been updated in years.[5]  Issues like 'Add PetalBot', (which hist my
sites almost as much as BingBot) are closed referencing the 3-yr-old
and still open "apache-badbots -- update?" [3]

I found an alternative (but haven't tried it yet): Apache Ultimate Bad
Bot Blocker [4] specifically for Apache (and it can send blocks to
fail2ban).

I've used fail2ban successfully for years to help defend my servers
from unwanted SSH logins. Does anyone know of an alternative to
fail2ban. Or for that matter, consider this a PSA that the project
could use some help.

[1] This page was last modified on 25 May 2016, at 21:29.
[2] https://github.com/fail2ban/fail2ban/network/members
[3] https://github.com/fail2ban/fail2ban/issues/1950
[4] https://github.com/mitchellkrogza/apache-ultimate-bad-bot-blocker
[5] https://github.com/fail2ban/fail2ban/blob/master/config/filter.d/apache-badbots.conf
(and the generate script connects to a dead source)

~ Greg

Greg Rundlett
https://eQuality-Tech.com
https://freephile.org