Figured it out,
The issue was that I had a custom jail setup for a different service and it wasn't configured correctly and that was keeping fail2ban from starting correctly.
So when I ran "service fail2ban status" I would get this before I fixed the other jail:
● fail2ban.service - LSB: Start/stop fail2ban Loaded: loaded (/etc/init.d/fail2ban) Active: active (exited) since Mon 2016-01-25 18:41:50 EST; 3s ago Process: 11673 ExecStop=/etc/init.d/fail2ban stop (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS) Process: 11683 ExecStart=/etc/init.d/fail2ban start (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS) Jan 25 18:41:50 PI2 fail2ban[11683]: Starting authentication failure monitor: fail2banERROR No file(s) found for glob /wrong/way/service.log #edit to your needs Jan 25 18:41:50 PI2 fail2ban[11683]: ERROR Failed during configuration: Have not found any log file for service jail Jan 25 18:41:50 PI2 fail2ban[11683]: failed! Jan 25 18:41:50 PI2 systemd[1]: Started LSB: Start/stop fail2ban.
After I fixed it:
● fail2ban.service - LSB: Start/stop fail2ban Loaded: loaded (/etc/init.d/fail2ban) Active: active (running) since Mon 2016-01-25 18:43:03 EST; 3s ago Process: 11774 ExecStop=/etc/init.d/fail2ban stop (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS) Process: 11784 ExecStart=/etc/init.d/fail2ban start (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS) CGroup: /system.slice/fail2ban.service └─11795 /usr/bin/python /usr/bin/fail2ban-server -b -s /var/run/fail2ban/fail2ban.sock -p /var/run/fail2ban/fail2ban.pid Jan 25 18:43:03 PI2 fail2ban[11784]: Starting authentication failure monitor: fail2ban. Jan 25 18:43:03 PI2 systemd[1]: Started LSB: Start/stop fail2ban.