Today, like the past few days, we have had some downtime. Apparently some script kids are enjoying themselves by targeting our server (and others). Sorry for the inconvenience.
Most of these ‘attacks’ are targeted at the database, but some are more ddos-like and can be mitigated by using a CDN. Some other Lemmy servers are using Cloudflare, so we know that works. Therefore we have chosen Cloudflare as CDN / DDOS protection platform for now. We will look into other options, but we needed something to be implemented asap.
For the other attacks, we are using them to investigate and implement measures like rate limiting etc.
HAProxy has some really good features a server admin can use locally without sending all of our data to Cloudflare or OVH.
https://www.haproxy.com/blog/application-layer-ddos-attack-protection-with-haproxy
There are many protection modules for most reverse proxies that provide basic (limiting) or sophisticated (captcha, calculation challenge, etc) DDoS protection. HAProxy is just a very powerful and easily extensible proxy.
Sure, but you still have to pay for servers to run the proxy instances on. Any DDoS of appreciable size will knock over the number of instances that lemmy.world could stand up. Interesting thought, though. Maybe CloudFlare or others use HAProxy internally? I’m actually not sure what tech they use
It’s usually very effective unless the amount of connections is too much for one machine anyways. Along with bandwidth shaping and connection throttling it can fend off smaller attacks.
A huge botnet would bring down a single proxy instance in any case, true.