Hi, I’ve had issues for the last days where my services were unreachable via their domains sporadically. They are scattered across 2-3 VMs which are working fine and can be reached by their domain (usually x.my.domain subdomains) via my nginx reverse proxy (running in it’s own Debian vm). The services themself were running fine. My monitoring (Node Exporter/Prometheus) notified me that the conntrack limit on the nginx vm was reached in the timeframes where my services weren’t reachable, so that seems to be the obvious issue.
As for the why, it seems that my domains are known to more spammers/scripters now. The nginx error.log grew by factor 100 from one day to the next. Most of my services are restriced to local IPs, but some like this lemmy instance are open entirely (nginx vm has port 80 and 443 forwarded).
I never heard of conntrack before but tried to read up on it a bit. It keeps track of the vm’s connections. The limit seems to be rather low, apparently it depends on the memory of the vm which is also low. I can increase the memory and the limit, but some posts suggest to generally disable it if not stricly needed. The vm is doing nothing but reverse proxying so I’m not sure if I really need it. I usually stick to Debians defauls though. Would appreciate input on this as I don’t really see what the conseqences of this would be. Can it really just be disabled?
But that’s just making symptons go away and I’d like to stop the attackers even before reaching the vm/nginx. I basically have 2 options.
- The vm has ufw enabled and I can set up fail2ban (should’ve done that earlier). However, I’m not sure if this helps with the conntrack thing since they need to make a connection before getting f2b’d and that will stay in the list for a bit.
- There’s an OPNsense between the router and the nginx vm. I have to figure out how, but I bet there’s a possibility to subscribe to known-attacker-IP-lists and auto-block or the like. I’d like some transparency here though and also would want to see which of the blocked IPs actually try to get in.
Would appreciate thoughts or ideas on this!
You could enable Suricata on OPNsense, which will allow you to subscribe to some known attacker lists and so one. But the problem these days are mostly AI scrapers that usually don’t show up on these lists as they are not attackers per se, but just cause a lot of database load by repeatably probing every part of your web-applications.
