fail2ban (up to 0.8.3) requires Python 2.5. If 2.6 is used then you will see repeated "fail2ban.server : ERROR Unexpected communication error" in the logfile. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1.Install fail2ban on a system with python 2.6 2. 3. Workaround: Install Python 2.5 (if it is not already there) Change the #! line in /usr/bin/fail2ban-server from "python" to "python2.5". You may have to do this for the other components but I was able to at least do a fail2ban-client status with no errors. Personally speaking, I think it would be too much to just cause python 2.5 to install. Instead I think it would be best to test for the existence of 2.5 and if it is not there, then fail the build and warn the user to install it. Hopefully upstream will fix this requirement.
This is a known issue on other distros too. See https://bugs.launchpad.net/fedora/+source/fail2ban/+bug/372304 for fedora, ubuntu and suse references.
(In reply to comment #1) > https://bugs.launchpad.net/fedora/+source/fail2ban/+bug/372304 The last comment suggests that it has been fixed.
0.8.4 have been released which works with python 2.6. You can get it here: http://downloads.sourceforge.net/fail2ban/fail2ban-0.8.4.tar.bz2
I opened bug 284279 which is a version bump to fail2ban-0.8.4. There is an ebuild included in the bug as well as a link to my overlay on github.
I can confirm that the bug is gone in version 0.8.4. A little longer and we can stabilize that one, in the mean time it might be a good idea to add appropriate dependencies so 0.8.3 won't install on python-2.6-only systems.
Fixed
