Fail2Ban Got a Web Dashboard, and It’s Pretty Handy
If you’ve ever managed a server, you’ve probably met Fail2Ban. It’s that silent, grumpy bouncer in the corner of your SSH log, tirelessly kicking out brute-forcers and script kiddies. It works, but let’s be honest: parsing its logs with grep and awk isn’t exactly a joy. What if you could see what it’s doing at a glance?
Enter Fail2Ban-Report, a clean, web-based dashboard that gives you a real-time view of your bans, filters logs intelligently, and even lets you manage blocklists without touching the command line. It turns a text-based watchdog into something you can actually visualize and interact with.
What It Does
In short, this tool takes the log output from Fail2Ban and serves it up in a simple web interface. Y…
Fail2Ban Got a Web Dashboard, and It’s Pretty Handy
If you’ve ever managed a server, you’ve probably met Fail2Ban. It’s that silent, grumpy bouncer in the corner of your SSH log, tirelessly kicking out brute-forcers and script kiddies. It works, but let’s be honest: parsing its logs with grep and awk isn’t exactly a joy. What if you could see what it’s doing at a glance?
Enter Fail2Ban-Report, a clean, web-based dashboard that gives you a real-time view of your bans, filters logs intelligently, and even lets you manage blocklists without touching the command line. It turns a text-based watchdog into something you can actually visualize and interact with.
What It Does
In short, this tool takes the log output from Fail2Ban and serves it up in a simple web interface. You get a live feed of banned IPs, can see which services (like sshd or nginx) are triggering the bans, and have the ability to search and filter through the activity. It also provides controls to manually add or remove IPs from Fail2Ban’s blocklists, right from your browser.
Why It’s Cool
The clever part is in the filtering. Instead of a raw, chronological dump, the dashboard lets you slice the data. Want to see all the failed login attempts from the last hour targeting your web server? Or find out if that one IP you just banned has been poking around before? You can do that without writing a single complex log query.
It’s built with practicality in mind. The interface is minimal and fast, focusing purely on giving you the information you need to make decisions. For developers or sysadmins managing multiple servers, this kind of at-a-glance visibility is a serious time-saver. It’s like giving Fail2Ban a proper control panel instead of just a terminal output.
How to Try It
Getting it running is straightforward. The project is a Python application, so you can clone the repo and run it directly. Here’s the quick version:
- Clone the repository:
git clone https://github.com/SubleXBle/Fail2Ban-Report.git
cd Fail2Ban-Report
- Install the required dependencies (a
requirements.txtis provided):
pip install -r requirements.txt
- Run the application:
python app.py
By default, it will look for your Fail2Ban logs in the usual locations and spin up a web server (typically on http://localhost:5000). Point your browser there, and you’re in. The README has more detailed configuration options if your setup is non-standard.
Final Thoughts
This isn’t a monolithic monitoring suite; it’s a focused, single-purpose tool that does one job well. For anyone tired of tailing logs, Fail2Ban-Report is a welcome upgrade. It makes the security data you already have more accessible and actionable. It’s the kind of utility you set up once and then wonder how you managed without it.
Check out the project on GitHub to see the code, report issues, or contribute. It’s a solid example of a practical tool built to solve a real, everyday pain point.
Follow for more cool projects: @githubprojects
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