Chances on an update? :)

[ptruman]

Hi

I stumbled across this by accident looking for a fail2ban GUI, and was fiddling with some docker images that try to implement your fail2web and fail2rest code.

Whilst fail2web starts up, and does talk to fail2rest (I managed to get /api/whois to behave) - any other call returns "invalid pickle version" - as it seems fail2ban 0.11.1 has switched up versions.

Is it possible you may update this to use the newer versions of Pickle?

[moritzj29]

I See this issue is open quite some time now, but I tried to set up fail2rest today and stumbled upon the same issue.

Apparently fail2ban uses Python's pickle.HIGHEST_PROTOCOL which is version 5 since Python 3.8. I guess this has to be implemented in the underlying library, since they support only up to v4. I raised a question there to support Pickle protocol v5:
kisielk/og-rek#62

Alternatively, one may try to change fail2ban's code to use pickle version 4 instead. I guess v5 is not mandatory but just set as default, but I don't know for sure... If I find time I may try this approach.

[moritzj29]

the pickle version issue has been addressed in the mentioned issue. For me, fail2rest works with the latest fail2ban. Make sure to update the dependencies to include the fix.
(Changing pickle.HIGHEST_PROTOCOL to pickle.DEFAULT_PROTOCOL in fail2ban did also work as a workaround)

I'm still struggeling with fail2web though, but thats not the topic here...

[Sean-Der]

Hey @moritzj29 sorry I haven't responded sooner!

I am pretty consumed with https://github.com/pion these days unfortunately. If you are interested I would love to give you admin access to all the fail2* repos! I would encourage you to do full rewrites and bring them up to modern Go standards :)

Or you could start a fork under a new name and we can make notes in the README that your version is what people should use.

[moritzj29]

Hi @Sean-Der, thanks for the offer! But unfortunately I have no experience with Go so far, so I will not do any development in that direction. Sorry. I hope somebody else continues the development, since it would be a handy tool.
I think I will go with a Prometheus metrics exporter, which serves my purposes quite well at the moment.

[pto199]

Can somebody shed some more light on this fix? Where in the fail2ban code do I make a change? I don't see only see pickle.HIGHEST_PROTOCOL anywhere. My fail2ban server and client are using python3.

So the problem here is Fail2rest is too old and doesnt work with python3?

[moritzj29]

Hi @pto199,

it's actually been quite a while since I digged into this, but I think the relevant lines in the fail2ban code are:

• https://github.com/fail2ban/fail2ban/blob/f81f85569d88da74d76f286b431dc54d0ae00748/fail2ban/client/csocket.py#L28
• https://github.com/fail2ban/fail2ban/blob/f81f85569d88da74d76f286b431dc54d0ae00748/fail2ban/server/asyncserver.py#L27
• and of course all references in these files to HIGHEST_PROTOCOL

Nevertheless, according to https://docs.python.org/3/library/pickle.html?highlight=pickle#pickle-protocols v5 should still be the highest protocol and this is supported by the underlying GO library in the meantime. (as linked above) For me it was working back then, but I'm not using it at the moment. So I am not sure if this is really the issue..

[pto199]

Its not working, even after I change all instances in those 2 files of HIGHEST_PROTOCOL to DEFAULT_PROTOCOL.

But this makes sense, because HIGHEST_PROTOCOL = Pickle version 5. According to that pythons doc link, DEFAULT_PROTOCOL = pickle version 4 (for Python 3.8, which is what the latest version of fail2ban uses)

This Fail2Rest\fail2web Server is using Pickle version 2 I believe (Which Python 2.3 uses) as I can only get this working with an old version of fail2ban ([0.10.3.1] from 8 years ago which used pickle version 2.

So the question is how do I edit the fail2ban code to switch it to pickle version 2?