Another post on fail2ban reminded me of a problem I had in Italy, when the ADSL connection kept dropping, and only came back on re-booting. (I solved the problem in the end by getting a Billion modem/router in place of the no-name one supplied by Telecom Italia.) It seems that if there was no internet connection, fail2ban hung for an inordinate length of time, possibly for ever, when shutting down. I found I had to stop it separately, before shutting down or re-booting. -- Timothy Murphy e-mail: gayleard /at/ eircom.net tel: +353-86-2336090, +353-1-2842366 s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland