this post was submitted on 17 Sep 2025
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Privacy

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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.

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[–] irmadlad@lemmy.world 1 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

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