How to Whitelist an IP in fail2ban on Ubuntu & Debian

Fail2ban is a useful application to protect servers against brute force attacks. It reads application logs and banned IPs detected as attackers. Fail2ban can be the program to ban an IP temporarily or permanent. You can also whitelist any specific IP address in whitelist to never block by fail2ban. This tutorial will help you whitelist an IP in fail2ban in Ubuntu, Debian, and LinuxMint Linux systems.

Whitelist IP in Fail2ban

First of all, Make a local copy of jail.conf and edit it. In Debian based systems fail2ban configuration files are stored under /etc/fail2ban directory.

cp /etc/fail2ban/jail.conf /etc/fail2ban/jail.local
vi /etc/fail2ban/jail.local

Now, add your IP address under ignoreip option inside the DEFAULT section. The multiple IPs must be seprated with a white space. For example:

[DEFAULT]

ignoreip = 192.168.10.100 192.168.2.0/32

After adding your IP, save the file and restart fail2ban service:

systemctl restart fail2ban

All done!