Misleading error message when not using sudo

[Christoph Buchner]

I just did a fresh install of fail2ban on Ubuntu Oneiric.
When using fail2ban-client without sudo, the given error messages are misleading, or don't point out that you need admin privileges to do what you want.

For example, "fail2ban-client status" gives
"ERROR Unable to contact server. Is it running?" even if the server is actually running.
If, as a new user, you react to that message by starting the server with "fail2ban-client status", you get, after some other logging messages,
"ERROR Could not start server. Maybe an old socket file is still present. Try to remove /var/run/fail2ban/fail2ban.sock. If you used fail2ban-client to start the server, adding the -x option will do it"
but neither the -x option not manually removing /var/run/fail2ban/fail2ban.sock will solve this error - very confusing.

Interestingly, I haven't found this requirement anywhere in the docs (though in hindsight, it's logical that privileges would be needed >.<). I'm also not the only one with this problem, as I finally found the solution here: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1682296

[Daniel Black (daniel-black)]

added as https://github.com/fail2ban/fail2ban/issues/595