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
I’ve repeatedly stated this before: Proof of Work bot-management is only Proof of Javascript bot-management. It is nothing to a headless browser to by-pass. Proof of JavaScript does work and will stop the vast majority of bot traffic. That’s how Anubis actually works. You don’t need to punish actual users by abusing their CPU. POW is a far higher cost on your actual users than the bots.
Last I checked Anubis has an JavaScript-less strategy called “Meta Refresh”. It first serves you a blank HTML page with a
<meta>tag instructing the browser to refresh and load the real page. I highly advise using the Meta Refresh strategy. It should be the default.I’m glad someone is finally making an open source and self hostable bot management solution. And I don’t give a shit about the cat-girls, nor should you. But Techaro admitted they had little idea what they were doing when they started and went for the “nuclear option”. Fuck Proof of Work. It was a Dead On Arrival idea decades ago. Techaro should strip it from Anubis.
I haven’t caught up with what’s new with Anubis, but if they want to get stricter bot-management, they should check for actual graphics acceleration.
POW is a far higher cost on your actual users than the bots.
That sentence tells me that you either don’t understand or consciously ignore the purpose of Anubis. It’s not to punish the scrapers, or to block access to the website’s content. It is to reduce the load on the web server when it is flooded by scraper requests. Bots running headless Chrome can easily solve the challenge, but every second a client is working on the challenge is a second that the web server doesn’t have to waste CPU cycles on serving clankers.
POW is an inconvenience to users. The flood of scrapers is an existential threat to independent websites. And there is a simple fact that you conveniently ignored: it fucking works.
