Today, I upgraded fail2ban from 0.8.0-r1 to 0.8.3 and started seeing “Unexpected communication error” in the logs like what I have listed below.

Today, I upgraded fail2ban from 0.8.0-r1 to 0.8.3 and started seeing “Unexpected communication error” in the logs like what I have listed below.


* Stopping fail2ban ... [ ok ]
* Starting fail2ban ... [ ok ]
2009-08-26 09:54:53,799 fail2ban.server : INFO Starting Fail2ban v0.8.3
2009-08-26 09:54:53,813 fail2ban.server : INFO Starting in daemon mode
2009-08-26 09:54:53,988 fail2ban.server : ERROR Unexpected communication error
2009-08-26 09:54:53,990 fail2ban.server : ERROR Unexpected communication error
2009-08-26 09:54:53,991 fail2ban.server : ERROR Unexpected communication error
2009-08-26 09:54:53,993 fail2ban.server : ERROR Unexpected communication error
2009-08-26 09:54:53,995 fail2ban.server : ERROR Unexpected communication error
2009-08-26 09:54:53,996 fail2ban.server : ERROR Unexpected communication error
2009-08-26 09:54:54,047 fail2ban.jail : INFO Jail 'apache-map' started
2009-08-26 09:54:54,049 fail2ban.server : ERROR Unexpected communication error
2009-08-26 09:54:54,135 fail2ban.jail : INFO Jail 'apache-badbots' started
2009-08-26 09:54:54,155 fail2ban.server : ERROR Unexpected communication error


After some Googling, I came across this post: http://forum.ubuntu-fr.org/viewtopic.php?id=313098

It basically says, you need to change the Python version from 2 to 2.5? I don’t quite get this since python2 points to the latest version of python2 via symlink.


lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 9 Aug 18 06:13 python -> python2.6
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 17 Aug 18 06:13 python-config -> python-config-2.6
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1200 Jul 1 08:33 python-config-2.5
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1200 Aug 18 06:12 python-config-2.6
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 9 Aug 18 06:13 python2 -> python2.6
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 5352 Jul 1 08:33 python2.5
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 5352 Aug 18 06:12 python2.6


I just upgraded from 2.5 to 2.6. I wanted to make sure that 2.6 wasn’t the deal, so I changed /usr/bin/fail2ban-server to use python2.6 directly, and the problem persisted. I changed it to 2.5 and the message now goes away? Could be related to a problem with python or fail2ban?? I ran python-updater again today to make sure there wasn’t something goofy there:


python-updater -p
* Starting Python Updater from 2.5 to 2.6 :
* No packages needs to be remerged.


Not sure what’s up, or where the problem is located.