The fail2ban server can take several seconds to shut down. This can
make Gentoo's start-stop-service time out and decide that stopping has
failed, even if it actually succeeds a few seconds later.
The default timeout for start-stop-service if --retry is not specified
appears to be 5 seconds. Increase that to 30 seconds to be sure that if
fail2ban-server is going to be able to stop, it has time to do so.
Currently, if fail2ban is killed (or crashes), its status will be
reported by '/etc/init.d/fail2ban status' as 'running' even though it
is not. Attempting to restart the service also fails, because Gentoo
unsuccessfully tries to stop the service.
By using start-stop-daemon and providing a pidfile, Gentoo will
instead report the status as 'crashed' and allow the service to be
restarted as normal.
These fixes are pretty pedantic, but they do simplify the script a
little.
* Checking the existence of a file/directory before creating/deleting
it adds complexity and raciness. There are better options.
* mkdir -p does the job of making sure a directory exists. (It only
fails if there's a filesystem error or something.)
* Likewise, rm -f doesn't fail if the file doesn't exist.
* rm -r isn't neccessary because the socket shouldn't be a directory.
(If it is for some reason, that should be an error.)
The address has changed from "59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston,
MA 02111-1307 USA" to "51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston,
MA 02110-1301, USA" some time ago.
Hank Leininger