Learn all about using Plesk & Fail2ban to protect your servers. Our Plesk Support team is here to help you with your questions and concerns.

Plesk Fail2ban: How to Setup

Safeguarding our server from brute force attacks has become a norm in today’s digital world.

Fail2Ban is a powerful tool that offers help. It automates monitoring log files for suspicious patterns and taking proactive measures to ban potential threats.

Today, we are going to take a look at setting up Fail2Ban on our OVH VPS.

1. To begin with, we have to log into our Plesk server via the following URL. We have to replace the X’s with our server’s IP address.

   https://XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX:8443
2. Then, head to “Tools & Settings” and select “Updates & Upgrades”.
3. Now, click on “Add/Remove Components” and select ‘Fail2Ban’ from the available components. This will start the installation process.
4. Next, click ‘Continue’ to proceed with the installation process.
5. Once completed, we can access Fail2Ban via Plesk > Tools & Settings > Address Banning (Fail2Ban).

How to Set Up Fail2Ban for Automatic IP Banning

1. First, head to “Tools & Settings” and select “IP Address Banning (Fail2Ban)” in the Security group.
2. Now, we can enable the intrusion detection checkbox to activate the Fail2Ban service.
3. Furthermore, we have to specify settings like IP address ban period, time interval for detection, and the number of failures before banning an IP.
4. Finally, click ‘OK’ to apply the configuration.

How to Manage IP Addresses Manually

While Fail2Ban offers a GUI for viewing and whitelisting IP addresses, adding an IP manually requires SSH access.

We can view all Fail2Ban Blacklist IPs with this command:

sudo iptables -nL

We can manually block an IP as seen here:

sudo fail2ban-client set JAILNAME banip IP ADDRESS

Here, we have to replace JAILNAME with the specific jail name and IP ADDRESS` with the IP we wish to ban.

Furthermore, we can view our Jail’s status:

fail2ban-client status

Our experts recommend being cautious to avoid accidentally banning our IP Plesk Supportduring this process.

[Need assistance with a different issue? Our team is available 24/7.]

Conclusion

In brief, our Support Experts demonstrated how to set up Fail2ban while using Plesk.