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 I’ve found a few guides but some of them seem fairly outdated.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.

  • SirMaple__@lemmy.caEnglish
    51·
    1 day ago

    Crowdsec with a central LAPI server. You should install it on the servers themselves to monitor the application logs directly. Then every bouncer(firewall, router, edge device) connected to the LAPI will all block the same IPs. I got sick of repeat offenders and upped the ban time to 1 year in hours.

    • Matty_r@programming.devOPEnglish
      2·
      1 day ago

      Awesome that makes a lot of sense, cheers. So I’ll install the Crowdsec agent on the Nginx Proxy Manager, and potentially also on the servers.

      • SirMaple__@lemmy.caEnglish
        2·
        14 hours ago

        No problem. It’s a great piece of software. I have it monitoring logs for nextcloud, vaultwarden, mailcow(postfix & dovecot), basic nginx proxies (just to be safe and for rate limiting). I have 4 OPNsense and 1 Debian bouncers.

        I had an issue with so a note about setting up the bouncer on OPNsense. If you have the LAPI on a different machine you can currently only connect OPNsense to it using the command line. The LAPI options in the web interface are for defining the interface to bind to and run the LAPI on OPNsense itself. Which isn’t an issue, I just wanted it on a VM so it’s easier to keep online instead of it going down if the OPNsense it’s on fails. Plus I like to keep SSH disabled on my OPNsense devices and spend a bit of time using cscli on the LAPI VM from time to time.

        • Matty_r@programming.devOPEnglish
          1·
          13 hours ago

          Cheers, I’ve since discovered that’s is “bouncers” that I want on the endpoints I.e on my Nginx Proxy Manager. I’ll just use the LAPI on the Opnsense box for now I think.

    • mbirth@lemmy.mlEnglish
      6·
      1 day ago

      I’ve recently enabled banning whole subnets if more than 3 malicious actors from that subnet are on the blocklist. This is great for all those DigitalOcean droplets and other cheap hosters used by those people…

      • SirMaple__@lemmy.caEnglish
        1·
        1 day ago

        I’ve been thinking about going this route. What size subnet are you banning? /24?

        Only thing stopping me is I selfhost email and don’t want to ban say a whole subnet from Microsoft/Azure and end up blocking the outgoing servers for O365. I’m sure I can dig around and look at the prefixes to see which are used for which of their services just haven’t had the time yet.

        • mbirth@lemmy.mlEnglish
          3·
          1 day ago

          I let CrowdSec determine that. I’m seeing /13, /12 and even /10 in my decisions list. All seem to be Amazon AWS ranges.

          • sudneo@lemm.eeEnglish
            2·
            1 day ago

            Wow, those are big networks. Obviously I suppose in case of AWS it doesn’t matter as no human visitor (except maybe some VPN connection?) will visit from there.

            As someone who bans /32 IPs only, is the main advantage resource consumption?