(Almost) getting locked out of your own server. It's something we all have to go through.
I once changed which port SSH was running on, over SSH, whilst I was away from the machine. I didn't, however, update the firewall to allow any packets in to the new port. I got locked out and had to call someone who was able to physically get to the machine and dictate the commands they had to type in to let me back in! Thankfully, I had the foresight to back up the configuration file so I could just ask them to copy it back over the existing one. Not my finest moment! :)
hahaha :) I got a bit further now. Before fail2ban wouldn't even create a logfile. So I removed and reinstalled it. Now I'm getting a log file. Also before when I made my own custom filter I got some strange error message and then fail2ban refused to start. Now I just get failed to start. So I know my install is right now, just need to have a closer lookat failregex expressions cuz not getting them right and if I use the ones from apache-auth.conf it doesn't work either probably because of the same reason I mentioned in my first post. And if I copy the filter and give it a different name, sounds logical that it won't work :P