I got into the self-hosting scene this year when I wanted to start up my own website run on old recycled thinkpad. A lot of time was spent learning about ufw, reverse proxies, header security hardening, fail2ban.
Despite all that I still had a problem with bots knocking on my ports spamming my logs. I tried some hackery getting fail2ban to read caddy logs but that didnt work for me. I nearly considered giving up and going with cloudflare like half the internet does. But my stubbornness for open source self hosting and the recent cloudflare outages this year have encouraged trying alternatives.
Coinciding with that has been an increase in exposure to seeing this thing in the places I frequent like codeberg. This is Anubis, a proxy type firewall that forces the browser client to do a proof-of-work security check and some other nice clever things to stop bots from knocking. I got interested and started thinking about beefing up security.
I’m here to tell you to try it if you have a public facing site and want to break away from cloudflare It was VERY easy to install and configure with caddyfile on a debian distro with systemctl. In an hour its filtered multiple bots and so far it seems the knocks have slowed down.
My botspam woes have seemingly been seriously mitigated if not completely eradicated. I’m very happy with tonights little security upgrade project that took no more than an hour of my time to install and read through documentation. Current chain is caddy reverse proxy -> points to Anubis -> points to services
Good place to start for install is here
It’s a great service. I hate the character.
You know the thing is that they know the character is a problem/annoyance, thats how they grease the wheel on selling subscription access to a commecial version with different branding.
https://anubis.techaro.lol/docs/admin/botstopper/
pricing from site
Commercial support and an unbranded version
If you want to use Anubis but organizational policies prevent you from using the branding that the open source project ships, we offer a commercial version of Anubis named BotStopper. BotStopper builds off of the open source core of Anubis and offers organizations more control over the branding, including but not limited to:
In the near future this will expand to:
In order to sign up for BotStopper, please do one of the following:
I have to respect the play tbh its clever. Absolutely the kind of greasy shit play that Julian from the trailer park boys would do if he were an open source developer.
I wish more projects did stuff like this.
It just feels silly and unprofessional while being seriously useful. Exactly my flavour of software, makes the web feel less corporate.
You can customize the images if you want: https://anubis.techaro.lol/docs/admin/botstopper#customizing-images
I can’t access the page to validate this because I don’t allow JS; isn’t that gated behind a paywall?
Not sure why you’re getting down votes for just asking a question.
Lots of idol worship in the dev community, question the current darling and people get upset.
Not idol worship, rather, it’s silly to complain about JS when tools like NoScript allow you to selectively choose what runs instead of guessing what it is. It’s simply a documentation page like it says on the URL. I mean, they’re incredibly tame on the danger scale to leave your guard all the way up and instead take a jab at the entire community that had nothing to do with your personal choices.
Who jabbed at anything?
I can’t get to that page, so I asked a question about the contents.
Someone here is being silly, we just disagree about who.
It gets quite silly when you blame the entire dev community for supposedly downvoting you over ideals rather than being overly strict about them. I also prefer HTML-first and think it should be the norm, but I draw the line somewhere reasonable.
Yeah, and you can run the innocuous JS or figure out what it is from the URL. You’re tying your own hands while dishing it out to everyone else.
You can just fork it and replace the image.
The authors talks about it here on their blog a bit more.
It looks like it might be; I just know someone that has a site using it and they use a different mascot, so I thought it would have been trivial. I kind of wonder why it wouldn’t be possible to just docker bind mount a couple images into the right path, but I’m guessing maybe they obfuscate/archive the file they’re reading from or something?
It’s actually possible, also, it’s open source so nothing stop you from making your fork with your own images and build it