What do you run; Opnsense, pfsense, Smoothwall, maybe a WAF like wazuh?
Today was update/audit firewall day. I’m running a standalone instance of pFsense on a Protectli Vault FW4B - 4 Port - Intel Quad Core - 8GB RAM - 120GB mSATA SSD with unbound, pfBlockerNG, Suricata, ntopng, and heavily filtered. I did bump the swap to 8 GB as I’ve previously noticed a few ‘out of swap’ errors under load.
Before I signed off, I ran it through a couple porn sites to see if my adblocking strategy was working. Not one intrusive ad. Sweet!
Show me what you got.
Pfsense with pfblocker in a VM. Works wonders. Pipe fail2ban to pfblocker for extra goodness.
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I think I have the same protectli as you and it is awesome. Need it for my 2.5gb uplink. I use openwrt on it… Didn’t really like opnsense. I am more used to linux than bsd.
I host lots of services and get bombarded by scrapers, scanners, and skids both at home and on my VPSs.
I use ipset for the usual blocklists which I download regularly. I also have tarpits on 22/tcp (endlessh). I pipe the IPs from the endlessh logs into fail2ban which feeds the ipsets. I have ipset blocks and fail2ban on my home firewall and all VPSs and coordinate over mqtt. So
any fail2ban trigger > mqtt > every ipset block. Touch my 22/tcp anywhere and you get banned instantly everywhere. The program I use for this is called vallumd and it runs on openwrt.I also put maltrail everywhere but I’m not totally sure how to interpret and respond to the results. Probably will implement a pipe from maltrail to my mqtt > blocklist setup.
I don’t do any network-level adblocking… Might be a future project.
I think I have the same protectli as you and it is awesome
Yes it is. It was a little more than I wanted to spend, and I’m sure I could have gone with a cheaper configuration, but I figured I’d get something with a little ass to it as to not create a bottleneck right at the firewall.
I host lots of services and get bombarded by scrapers, scanners, and skids both at home and on my VPSs. Touch my 22/tcp anywhere and you get banned instantly everywhere.
I too host most of the services I use on a couple of VPS I run. It has always amazed me as to the thickness of the bot layer on the internet. Clearnet experiences something like 2+ zetabytes per 24 hours. Around 50% of that is bot traffic, and they are very sophisticated bots as well. Open port 22 and here they come by the thousands like a feeding frenzy. I went as far as blocking everything with hosts.allow (do first) & hosts.deny (do last). I’ve set f2b on aggressive mode with only one shot. LOL UFW rocks in the background along with Crowdsec. I probably go overboard with security. LOL
Largest ddos attack of all time? 12 tb/sec.
But yeah, I believe it when you say you get 24,855 tb/sec on your VPS.
Beg pardon? I am going to need clarification.
nftables. Deny all, start adding stuff until þings work.
My firewalls are simple, b/c I run a private VPN and just shut off all traffic except over WG. I’ve got one exposed VPS reverse proxying services from oþer VPSes over WG.
But: nftables, and only nftables. I’m a big believer in understanding how stuff works, and þe rulesets created by firewalld and ilk are convoluted - complexity adds risk.
Haha, I thought that said “until pings work”
Also an accurate reading.





