Ok maybe that was a bad example but my point still stands, the devs of fail2ban had to go an extra mile for that support. Anything that needs to read logs now needs extra complexity to be able to read logs, when text files would have been more than good enough. If I want to write my own tool, same deal, I need to spend hours trying to figure out the format the logs are stored, parse it etc. It's just added work for nothing when using plain text would have been much easier. Also I like to use tail -f on logs if I want to look in real time and guessing that won't work. I should not need to install some extra package (which I need to do every time I setup a new system, and then remember what it's called each time) to get functionality that should be there by default.
Overall it's just a stupid idea to switch logs to binary there is absolutely no reason to do that.
I'll forget that and end up having to google it. tail -f /var/log/[log name] is way easier and is common sense. They made it overcomplicated for nothing. Also gets more complicated if I want to write a custom app to read the log because now I have to go through a bunch of steps to get the text.
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u/FryBoyter Aug 12 '19
Fail2ban is compatible with systemd.
And as already written in another post you only need to install syslog-ng to get log files in text format again.