Hey all, i’ve decided I should probably setup something else to help block nefarious IP addresses. I’ve been looking into CrowdSec and Fail2Ban but i’m not really sure the best one to use.

My setup is OpnSense -> Nginx Proxy Manager -> Servers. I think I need to setup CrowdSec/Fail2Ban on the Nginx Proxy Manager to filter the access logs, then ideally it would setup the blocks on OpnSense - but i’m not sure that can be done?

Any experience in a setup like this? I’ve found a few guides but some of them seem fairly outdated.

Edit: thanks everybody for the great info. General consensus seems to be with crowdsec so I’ll go down that path and see how it goes.

Edit 2: So after having it up and running for the better part of a day, i’m going to remove it again. For some reason there was a performance impact loading websites, probably because it was waiting for a response from the Crowdsec hub? Either way, after stopping it from running everything is back to normal again. So I might revisit how I do it and probably try Fail2Ban now instead. Thanks everybody

  • Noggog@programming.devEnglish
    1·
    21 days ago

    I’ve been using crowdsec … but I’ve yet to see anyone banned but myself so far. Is everyone else having to write tons of whitelist parsers? I could whitelist my IP but I feel like that’s sidestepping the issue and doesn’t address friends/family also getting banned, coffeeshops, etc.

    Feels like I’m missing something as so far it’s been quite a pain to configure

      • Noggog@programming.devEnglish
        2·
        20 days ago

        It’s set up on the same box as my caddy install. I believe it’s getting passed the real IP because that’s what gets banned, and what I type in to unban it.

        It just sees normal operations as http probing. Like if some other service goes down, my GetHomepage will then 404 and that’s seen as probing. It bans surprisingly quick. Even after just one or two events (normal for someone just visiting the homepage) it’ll just kick em right out

        I’ve been having to inspect every alert and hand write whitelist parsers to whitelist 404s or whatever it may be for that app. Slowly accumulating a workable collection… but seems like I’m missing something as no one else seems to complain about this in threads like these

        Another example is my brother got banned for normal audiobookshelf usage. He just thought the server was buggy. It was just blocking him without us really noticing or thinking much of it at the time. Not great