Mark Davidson's questions

I've recently setup a new VPS running Gentoo (My first time using the distro so please forgive me is this is a really easy one) and as I've done with other servers installed fail2ban. Setting it up to block the host via iptables, on too many unsuccessful logins with ssh. However I'm getting a strange error that I can't quite solve.

When I start fail2ban I get these lines in the error log

2009-11-13 18:02:01,290 fail2ban.jail   : INFO   Jail 'ssh-iptables' started
2009-11-13 18:02:01,480 fail2ban.actions.action: ERROR  iptables -N fail2ban-SSH
iptables -A fail2ban-SSH -j RETURN
iptables -I INPUT -p tcp --dport ssh -j fail2ban-SSH returned 100

If I try and force a ban these errors show up in the log and the host is not banned

2009-11-13 11:23:26,905 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [ssh-iptables] Ban XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX
2009-11-13 11:23:26,929 fail2ban.actions.action: ERROR  iptables -n -L INPUT | grep -q fail2ban-SSH returned 100
2009-11-13 11:23:26,930 fail2ban.actions.action: ERROR  Invariant check failed. Trying to restore a sane environment
2009-11-13 11:23:27,007 fail2ban.actions.action: ERROR  iptables -N fail2ban-SSH
iptables -A fail2ban-SSH -j RETURN
iptables -I INPUT -p tcp --dport ssh -j fail2ban-SSH returned 100
2009-11-13 11:23:27,016 fail2ban.actions.action: ERROR  iptables -n -L INPUT | grep -q fail2ban-SSH returned 100
2009-11-13 11:23:27,016 fail2ban.actions.action: CRITICAL Unable to restore environment

My versions are as follows

Linux masked 2.6.18-xen-r12 #2 SMP Wed Mar 4 11:45:03 GMT 2009 x86_64 Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5504 @ 2.00GHz GenuineIntel GNU/Linux
net-analyzer/fail2ban-0.8.4 
net-firewall/iptables-1.4.3.2

If anyone could shead some light on these errors that would be great, I did wonder if it was a problem with iptables or some kernel modules but I can block an IP if I do.

iptables -I INPUT -s 25.55.55.55 -j DROP

so makes me think its something a bit more unusual.

Thanks a lot in advance

Hoping someone can help me with a server issue. Recently we upgraded to the latest apache on 2 boxes within are organisation. One being the master box the other being for failover. The upgrade went fine on the master box but on the failover box apache fails to start with no errors, being output or logged. Both boxes have the exact same configuration so found this a bit strange.

I've reinstalled apache and have been through checking the configs and did not find any obvious errors. Eventally I ran a syntax check on each config file being included and found that one of the files apparently has syntax errors.

Invalid command 'Order', perhaps misspelled or defined by a module not included in the server configuration

Invalid command 'php_value', perhaps misspelled or defined by a module not included in the server configuration

Invalid command 'GeoIPEnable', perhaps misspelled or defined by a module not included in the server configuration

I've trippled checked all the modules are enabled but it still fails. I've googled the subject of these errors loads but have been unable to fine a solution.

I was wondering if anyone had encountered such a problem before and could point me towards a solution.

Thanks for your help in advance.

P.s:

Apache related versions on server.

ii  apache2                      2.2.3-4+etch10                       Next generation, scalable, extendable web se
ii  apache2-mpm-prefork          2.2.3-4+etch10                       Traditional model for Apache HTTPD 2.1
ii  apache2-utils                2.2.3-4+etch10                       utility programs for webservers
ii  apache2.2-common             2.2.3-4+etch10                       Next generation, scalable, extendable web se
ii  libapache2-mod-geoip         1.1.8-2                              GeoIP support for apache2
ii  libapache2-mod-php5          5.2.0+dfsg-8+etch15                  server-side, HTML-embedded scripting languag