I don‘t know if this is the right place to ask, but is this an OK build for a first start in selfhosting? Is there anything obvious I could improve? I‘d mainly run Nextcloud, Immich, some Docker containers and smaller web applications and cronjobs.

  • hirihit640@sh.itjust.works
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    2
    ·
    1 day ago

    Unfortunate but understandable. I believe there are public lists of the IPs of major VPN providers if you wanted to make an exception, but as VPNs are sometimes used for scraping too, I can see why you might not want that.

    • melroy@kbin.melroy.org
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      23 hours ago

      Yea so the same servers and IP addresses VPN provider use (which are again just cloud providers) are also used for other purposes mainly by scrapers and DDos attacks indeed. Too bad all those cloud providers do not act accordingly in the past 5 - 10 years. Since its getting worse and worse. With the increase of datacenters and centralization, I consider it a duty of these companies to take action to stop these scammers, spammers, scrapers, and attackers.

      However, that is often not the case. Now I must say, I created Angie Guardian myself (alternative to Anubis). So hopefully soon I can slowly open some of ASN bans. And see how it goes.

      • hirihit640@sh.itjust.works
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        15 hours ago

        Do you know if the scrapers/bots are using the VPN providers? Or if they are just using VPSes in the same datacenter as the VPN, and the datacenter is just NATing all egress traffic to have the same IPv4. In that case I wonder if IPv6 could help distinguish between VPN traffic and bot traffic…

        Though ultimately a gate like Anubis or Angie Guardian might be the best solution here so nice work.

        • melroy@kbin.melroy.org
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          10 hours ago

          The scrapers most likely don’t use the VPN providers AFAIK. But these cloud providers have dozens of datacenter locations where you can rent your own virtual server (VPSes) and those datacenters are also often used by VPN providers.

          Its actually often coming from separate IP addresses. Which makes it actually even harder, its not just 1 or 2 IP addresses. Meaning both good and bad traffic has 100.000+ of unique IP addresses per IP range. At that point I block the whole ASN: https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/network-layer/what-is-an-autonomous-system/

          Meaning I basically block the whole datacenter and mark them as bad actors. Cloud server providers F*K up the internet, since before you can easily block one, two or ten IPs and be done. Today, those bad actors and scrapers or DDos attackers can use millions of unique IP addresses, because it can rely on the whole cloud provider IP ranges (ipv6 is even more insane ofc).

          https://asrank.caida.org/