Fail2ban Proven To Work On My Private Email Server

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I mentioned a really great program for Linux that actively combats potential hackers a while back. It's called fail2ban. In short, what it does is monitors failed login attempts in all of your logs, and if there are too many attempts on a potential service, it adds the IP address of the attacker to your iptables firewall rules.

Well, for the last few weeks my email server was blocking my own IP address. It would do it several times per day, and it was driving me nuts trying to figure it out. In order to check my email, I had to SSH into my server and reset the firewall rules. Fail2ban was clearly working.

I finally figured out what was causing the lockouts. My daughter has an iPod touch with email configured on it. I had reset her password a month or so ago, but never got around to updating the credentials in her iPod.

Well, it clicked the other day when I saw her playing with it. I updated the password, and voilla! No more lockouts!

Good work fail2ban! It works so good, it locked me out!

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