this post was submitted on 04 May 2025
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Hey all, i've decided I should probably setup something else to help block nefarious IP addresses. I've been looking into CrowdSec and Fail2Ban but i'm not really sure the best one to use.

My setup is OpnSense -> Nginx Proxy Manager -> Servers. I think I need to setup CrowdSec/Fail2Ban on the Nginx Proxy Manager to filter the access logs, then ideally it would setup the blocks on OpnSense - but i'm not sure that can be done?

Any experience in a setup like this? I've found a few guides but some of them seem fairly outdated.

Edit: thanks everybody for the great info. General consensus seems to be with crowdsec so I'll go down that path and see how it goes.

Edit 2: So after having it up and running for the better part of a day, i'm going to remove it again. For some reason there was a performance impact loading websites, probably because it was waiting for a response from the Crowdsec hub? Either way, after stopping it from running everything is back to normal again. So I might revisit how I do it and probably try Fail2Ban now instead. Thanks everybody

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[–] jrgd@lemm.ee 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I'm currently going through a similar situation at the moment (OPNSense firewall, Traefik reverse proxy). For my solution, I'm going to be trial running the Crowdsec bouncer as a Traefik middleware, but that shouldn't discourage you from using Fail2Ban.

Fail2Ban: you set policies (or use presets) to tempban IPs that match certain heuristic or basic checks.

Crowdsec Bouncer: does fail2ban checks if allowed. Sends anonymous bad behavior reports to their servers and will also ban/captcha check IPs that are found in the aggregate list of current bad actors. Claims to be able to perform more advanced behavior checks and blacklists locally.

If you can help it, I don't necessarily recommend having OPNSense apply the firewall rules via API access from your server. It is technically a vulnerability vector unless you can only allow for creating a certain subset of deny rules. The solution you choose probably shouldn't be allowed to create allow rules on WAN for instance. In most cases, let the reverse proxy perform the traffic filtering if possible.

[–] Matty_r@programming.dev 1 points 1 day ago

I did have that same thought actually, with opening up opnsense to be modified. But I also like the idea of it getting blocked before it even gets into my network, instead if letting it in initially and then blocking afterwards - that's kinda the whole job of a firewall after all ha ha