[CentOS] CentOS 6.3 - fail2ban not working properly + workaround

Tue Mar 12 16:35:13 UTC 2013
Timothy Murphy <gayleard at eircom.net>

Theo Band wrote:

> I have updated recently to 6 and see that fail2band ssh dos no longer
> works. Indeed after log rotate fail2ban seems to follow the old log file
> instead of the newly created /var/log/secure.
> I had backend = auto in /etc/fail2ban/jail.conf and gamin and pyinotify
> are both installed. I now changed backend to gamin and give it another
> try. The next log rotate is next week....
> Anyone else using fail2ban with CentOS6 installed from epel?

I'm running fail2ban on my server (under CentOS-6.4)
and it seems to be running according to
-------------------------
[tim at grover fail2ban]$ sudo service fail2ban status
Fail2ban (pid 31794) is running...
Status
|- Number of jail:      1
`- Jail list:           ssh-iptables
-------------------------
I have absolutely no idea how fail2ban works,
and I'm running it with the default /etc/fail2ban/fail2ban.conf ,
which seems to set the logfile to /var/log/fail2ban.log .
Should I actually study how it is meant to be configured?

I just yum-installed it (from Epel, I assume)
and hope it does its job, whatever that is.

Incidentally, I am running shorewall on this server.
Should I tell shorewall something about fail2ban,
or vice versa?