The last upgrade of EPEL package fail2ban misbehaves on CentOS 5, as it contains a syntax which is still unsupported on Python 2.4.
When trying to start fail2ban, you will get errors like these: ERROR NOK: ('invalid syntax', ('/usr/share/fail2ban/server/filterpyinotify.py', 214, 21, '\t\texcept Exception as e:\n')) ERROR NOK: ('ssh-iptables',)
A proposed fix is attached.
Best regards, Bussi Andrea