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
You are right. For most self-hosting usecases anubis is not only irrelevant, but it actually works against you. False sense of security and making your devices do extra work for nothing.
Anubis is though for public facing services that may get ddos or AI scrapped by some not targeted bot (for a target bot it’s trivial to get over Anubis in order to scrap).
And it’s never a substitute of crowdsec or fail2ban. Getting an Anubis token it’s just a matter of executing the PoW challenge. You still need a way to detect and ban malicious attacks.