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I see, e.g., this block of text in /var/log/messages: Dec 20 09:04:28 jik2 fail2ban.server.action: ERROR iptables -D INPUT -p tcp -m multiport --dports ssh -j fail2ban-sshd iptables -F fail2ban-sshd iptables -X fail2ban-sshd -- returned 1 There are two problems here: (1) fail2ban is logging syslog messages with line breaks in them; (2) rsyslog is allowing the line breaks to persist into /var/log/messages rather than either (a) replacing them with a space or "\n" or something or (b) prefixing each of the multiple lines in the mesesage with "Dec 20 09:04:28 jik2 fail2ban.server.action:" I don't know whether this should be fixed in fail2ban, rsyslog, or both, so I'm starting in fail2ban and letting the package maintainer decide.
fail2ban-0.8.11-2.fc19.noarch On Fedora 19 it seems to have "#012" instead of newlines in /var/log/messages. So it seems OK?
Yes, I believe this problem first started happening in Fedora 20.
FWIW, fail2ban in Fedora 20 is working a LOT better than the version in Fedora 19. It seems utterly broken for me in Fedora 19.
Re-assigned to rsyslog to get their take on the matter. fail2ban is simply using python's logging: logSys.error("%s -- returned %i" % (realCmd, retcode)) I'm not sure it's fail2ban's job to escape the newlines, but I'm open to ideas.
Nowadays, rsyslog just takes what journald throws its way. It _can_ be configured to escape various characters, but it is most likely not doing that by default. In your case, if there had been embedded '\n' in the body, rsyslog should have had split them into multiple messages - if it is receiving them directly from the source. This looks like an issue with journald. I'd need to have more data to provide any further insight. You can start by checking how the messages look in journalctl. What are the versions of the software involved? Any customization to the configuration? How did the original message look like? If you're actually logging to journald (via logSys), you can switch the bugzilla to systemd.
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On rsyslog's side, the newlines (and other control chars) are now escaped by default starting from rsyslog-8.8.0-2.fc22.