> at worst, fail2ban: causes you massive inconvinience or total lockout [...] it'll probably block you out.
I agree that fail2ban is useless once you've disabled password login, which you should have done.
But is anyone really getting locked out of their own systems by fail2ban unless they're doing something pretty weird? I thought it gave you about 5 password attempts, and then blocked you for 10 minutes - doesn't seem that draconian to me.