Question

Wordpress Droplet 20.04 issue with fail2ban plugin obsolete filters

Posted on February 18, 2023
DigitalOcean Droplets WordPress
Asked by Jochen Goldenstein

Hi I am using the wordpress droplet on ubuntu 20.04.The Wp-fail2ban plugin updated to version 5.0 and I get issues about obsolete filters

wordpress-hard.conf is obsolete (version 4.4.0.8).
wordpress-soft.conf is obsolete (version 4.4.0.4).
wordpress-extra.conf is obsolete (version 4.4.0.4). You should update your fail2ban filters as soon as possible.

How can I update?

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Jochen Goldenstein • February 19, 2023

Pinned Answer

I found the answer: To update the filters you have to download them from the plugins.svn.wordpress.org directory and move them to the filter directory of fail2ban.

$ wget https://plugins.svn.wordpress.org/wp-fail2ban/trunk/filters.d/wordpress-hard.conf
$ wget https://plugins.svn.wordpress.org/wp-fail2ban/trunk/filters.d/wordpress-soft.conf
$ wget https://plugins.svn.wordpress.org/wp-fail2ban/trunk/filters.d/wordpress-extra.conf
$ sudo mv wordpress-*.conf /etc/fail2ban/filter.d/

I found this solution in this german blog post www.my-it-brain.de/wordpress/wordpress-mit-fail2ban-vor-brute-force-angriffen-schuetzen/

Andrew Browne • May 4, 2023

The docs I found addressing this issue are here: https://docs.wp-fail2ban.com/en/5.0/maintenance.html Gotta read them carefully as they aren’t the most beginner-friendly.

But the Site Health warning doesn’t go away even after following the instructions and updating the 3 conf files, similar to @Red de Leon’s previous comment.

Anyone got any solves?

Red de Leon • February 22, 2023

I’m having the same problem using the one-click WordPress installer and even after updating the three conf files to the current 2023 versions from SVN, it’s still saying that the filters are outdated.

I also noticed that when I SSH in using the web console, there is a readme that says fail2ban is installed in mu-plugins, but it’s not installed there. It’s in the regular plugins directory.