and federation and db all work

Less than 10 min of down time:

Hmm it looks like it's working, right? Like a billion (!) garbage pages generated. Still 500k getting through but over 5 days that seems minimal.

I've not set up nice graphics for iocaine (or any of the host stats) bu this is the last 5 days and that is with the asn-blocks and AI block turned on in CF

curl -s http://127.0.0.1:42042/metrics | grep '^qmk_'
qmk_garbage_generated{host="127.0.0.1:42069"} 3888
qmk_garbage_generated{host="no.lastname.nz"} 1147955554
qmk_requests{host="127.0.0.1:42069"} 2
qmk_requests{host="172.18.0.1:42069"} 6
qmk_requests{host="no.lastname.nz"} 1386448
qmk_ruleset_hits{outcome="default",ruleset="default"} 490771
qmk_ruleset_hits{outcome="default",ruleset="trusted-agent"} 2
qmk_ruleset_hits{outcome="default",ruleset="trusted-path"} 134
qmk_ruleset_hits{outcome="garbage",ruleset="ai.robots.txt"} 1689
qmk_ruleset_hits{outcome="garbage",ruleset="major-browsers"} 48928
qmk_ruleset_hits{outcome="garbage",ruleset="poisoned-url"} 844868
qmk_ruleset_hits{outcome="garbage",ruleset="unwanted-visitors"} 64

Do you know how many of those are being caught by iocaine?

These are my stats for anubis (this is only UI requests - LemmyUI and Mlmym mostly, no federation or app usage in this). A total of about 600k requests. Weigh and Challenge are the options given a proof of work challenge to solve (weigh just means the rules for the user agent or whatever mean the challenge difficulty was adjusted, often to make it harder for suspicious requests).

Out of the challenges issued in this time period, around 11% were validated (so 89% of the weigh and challenge traffic was also denied in addition to "deny" which was denied without issuing a challenge due to rules).

This would have been a hectic 5 min.

Can you tell when I turned CF off?

vs.

It does look like that since 9am it's back to not much above background sort of levels, although at 6k/15min it would be more that doubling the server load.That 60K/15min may have made it struggle

Damn, good luck! At least those are all blocked rather than killing your server.

It's was getting worse, near 1,000,000 requests blocked in only 14 hours, peaking at 67/s blocked

When I get home I'll gig into the peak

Yes CGNAT could be a thing, but...

The top 150 IPs over night NZ time all appeared in the logs more or less the same number of tim4s 78-84 with the top two being outliers at 100+ The pattern is just so tight.

For the last 3 days (since turning on the block) there has been a dead spot from China from 4:00 to 14:00 NZST.

@Dave@lemmy.nz you seeing the same drop?

Ah i missed your edit. I don't have per country data like that, I've only very recently played with removing Cloudflare from the equation and haven't set up any geo-location stuff yet. My requests are coming pretty evenly over the day though, up and down a bit bit depending on time but nothing like what you're describing. I'm looking at all traffic though, not just China.

Seeing multiple operating systems and several browser versions from the same IP address over a relatively short period is very unlikely to represent ordinary human traffic.

This is not true, NAT makes this happen. From your home your android device, apple devices and windows devices will have different user agents based non the software version.

Now scale that up with technology like Carrier Grade NAT where one public IP is used for a dozen or several dozen houses.
At one IPS I worked for we had 140 apartments behind a single IP address. You can imagine the chaos of user agents happening there.

No doubt there is dodgy stuff going on, just that assumption doesn't match with technology.

It's just crazy, these indescriminate scrapers are the worst. They think they are getting more data but they are just scraping the same data over and over via different instances 🙄

Baseline is about 3.5-4.5k per 15min (4/s), this China traffic is 3x base traffic across 24h

For the last 3 days (since turning on the block) there has been a dead spot from China from 4:00 to 14:00 NZST.

@Dave@lemmy.nz you seeing the same drop?

Damn. I've got Cloudflare off so should go install a geoip database so I can check what country things are coming from.

Not to out do you but we actually hit 50 requests per second a few hours back! That's through the reverse proxy so includes federation and other traffic not hitting anubis.

not getting any better. Peaked at 25 requests per second blocked by CF just from China.

Damn, you're getting similar levels to us. Got about 520k requests to the UIs in the past 24 hours (this excludes federation or app usage that hit APIs directly, I have Anubis placed after those are split off).

Of those 520k, Anubis flat denies about half. and virtually all the rest are challenged, with somewhere around 7% actually being completed. So we are talking about 18k of the 520k getting through now. Most of those are probably still bots (logged in users get a straight pass through, and as mentioned federation or app users don't follow this path), but the server is much happier now than it was a few days ago.

I have Cloudflare disabled now, trying that out. I've had to get Grafana up to scratch as I don't get to use Cloudflare stats to track anymore.

470k blocked at CF in the past 24h, another 80+k tarpited in iocaine since 12h and still some getting through

Edit: Moved from mostly from CN to a mix of SE Asia and South America now

How's it holding up, making a difference? I reckon the bot hits are trending down from where they were a few days ago

CF ASN and bot block
│
▼
Caddy/Iocaine
│
├── response other than 421 ──► return Iocaine response
│
└── 421 ──────────────────────► continue to normal Caddy routing
                                  │
                                  ▼
                               Caddy - CN block
                                  │
                                  ▼
                                Lemmy

Caddyfile:

{$LEMMY_HOSTNAME} {
    import caddy-common

    ######################################
    ########## log files        ##########
    log cn_blocked {
            output file /data/cn-blocked.log
            format json
            no_hostname
    }

    ########## iocaine  code ##########
    @read method GET HEAD
            reverse_proxy @read host.docker.internal:42069 {
            @fallback status 421
            handle_response @fallback
    }

    ########## cn blocking code ##########
    @blocked {
            remote_ip 1.0.1.0/24 ...
    }

    route @blocked {
            log_name cn_blocked
            respond "<h1>Access Denied</h1>" 403
    }
    ##########   cn block ends  ##########
    ######################################  

Iocaine metrics with CF still on:

$ curl -s http://127.0.0.1:42042/metrics | grep '^qmk_'
qmk_garbage_generated{host="127.0.0.1:42069"} 3888
qmk_garbage_generated{host="no.lastname.nz"} 251440
qmk_requests{host="127.0.0.1:42069"} 2
qmk_requests{host="172.18.0.1:42069"} 2
qmk_requests{host="no.lastname.nz"} 404
qmk_ruleset_hits{outcome="default",ruleset="default"} 223
qmk_ruleset_hits{outcome="default",ruleset="trusted-path"} 1
qmk_ruleset_hits{outcome="garbage",ruleset="ai.robots.txt"} 11
qmk_ruleset_hits{outcome="garbage",ruleset="major-browsers"} 172
qmk_ruleset_hits{outcome="garbage",ruleset="unwanted-visitors"} 1

I remember investigating and finding all the problematic IPs had requests evenly spread. Dozens of IPs from China, Singapore, and various South American countries. All of them had approx 80k requests in the period I was looking at, as if they send a few requests with one, then the next, then the next, rotating through then back to the start. Avoids rate limits I guess.

I am considering adding Iocaine as a first line of defence before Anubis, and seeing if that helps

Yeah, I had about 600k + the ones I blackholed in Caddy in the 20h yesterday (I blackholed the whole 36.0.0.0/8 block in the end on the server)

3 requests (/api/v3/site /api/v3/post? /api/v3/comment/list?) in 50ms, from a IP then that IP would go silent for ages, then 500ms latter it was a fresh IP

Installing Anubis was certainly a big help for us, Iocaine should do something similar for you, fingers crossed!

I have been toggling the Cloudflare proxying trying to handle bots without it. old.lemmy.nz has had over 100k hits in the last 12 hours, this is just the ones that got past anubis. Something tells me that's not legit.

it has started up again just before I went to turn CF off, I think I'll leave it in and install Iocaine

CF bot filter (blocks about 3K/24h) => Caddy proxy => Iocaine => Caddy IP filter => Lemmy

The robots.txt is for well behaved bots. I already deployed that list quite some time back but it didn't help, because the problem are the not well behaved bots.

Iocane should be showing hidden links that only bots can see, and leading then into a maze of gibberish. It has other features too, but the core function is to keep them busy on easy to serve pages that poison their training and are inexpensive for your site to serve (as opposed to the lemmy pages, that have expensive database calls on every page load).