Hacker News Reader

Comment by belorn | Hacker News Reader

Fail2Ban is kind of required unless one like running out of sockets and are unburden by high cpu and disk load.

There is regular bot traffic attacking SSH, but it's not "saturate your downlink" level of traffic. If you're getting attacked that heavily then you're being specifically targeted.

Huh? I run ssh (OpenSSH) on port 22 with root login enabled and no fail2ban on a single-core laptop cpu from fifteen years ago. The load average is 0.00 even with the small mail and web server that runs on it

What cpu and especially what disk load are you talking about? Also not running out of sockets, not sure if that's RAM-dependent (the box has 2GB)

Working as a sysadmin, and with disk encryption the constant log writes generated from ssh was enough to cause heavy load on severs. Long lasting connections from bots also forced us to increase the maximum number of sockets, as some scan waves was enough to hit the maximum and block other connections. Fail2ban has mitigated those issues to the point where neither has been an issue.

I believe this depends on your exposure level. If you have one, or maybe no, domain names pointed at your server, you are probably fine. If you have tens, or hundreds, of domains pointed at your server (i.e. you are a web site hoster), you will probably need something like fail2ban.

On another server with the same setup, there's various services and websites running, so load average is never zero there (due to scrapers) but ssh has yet to catch my eye in htop. Whenever I've looked, even the amount of cpu that a Windows VM uses constantly while idle is many times higher than what ssh uses

Reply on news.ycombinator.com