I followed the fail2ban Ubuntu 14 tutorial that started out having me cp jail.conf jail.local but clearly fail2ban is still using jail.conf based on some simple tests. So I have questions:
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The main reason why you might use a local configuration file is that
/etc/fail2ban/jail.conf
is installed and managed by the packaging system. You are free to edit it, but you may be prompted to merge your changes manually when upgrading the package if there are changes to that file. For a bit of a deeper dive into fail2ban works, check out this article: