Anyway, I'm not here to advocate that everyone should install fail2ban tomorrow. My point was just that fail2ban wasn't bad advice in 2013 and isn't really bad advice even now. Sure, there are better tools out there for hardening services but at least fail2ban doesn't break those other tools. So there's nothing stopping you having a layered approach if you want.

And that's the crux of it for me. "Bad advice" would be something that hinders security whereas fail2ban does add to it. What is in contention is the significance it adds and this is where people have gotten hung up on SSH. For example fail2ban can work really effectively when you have multiple services running off the same host (eg HTTP(S), SMTP, and SSH).

The problem is most people just look at the default config and say "there's better tools for SSH" -- which is true but it also overlooks a lot of what fail2ban offers.

But as I said, I'm not an advocate for fail2ban. I just think some of the comments here against it are overstated. If someone wants to run fail2ban it wont harm their security. It might even enhance it depending on how they've set it up.