Might be helpful yes. I have bookmarked it for now. Thanks.

This specific issue why slrpnk.net is down right now seems unrelated to the bot traffic, but I think once I am able to fix the server setup, I will move it to some kind hybrid where the main bulk of the bot traffic is taken on by a professional VPS instead of my home network. In the last months it was sometimes so bad that I coudn’t even browse normally on my otherwise fully seperated / vlan-ed personal PC as the main fiber gateway seems to have been bogged down by the scraper traffic.

Would be nice, yes. But easier said than done 😓

I think a more realistic option is to move my self-hosting ambitions down a notch and only focus on more redundand backend services that are too costly on a rented VPS.

Due to the LLM scrapers I have been thinking that I might have to move to a hybrid system of going through a VPS with only some storage and compute services on my home servers remaining. It is an annoying expense of about 20€/month that I was hoping to avoid, but it will give some other benefits like a fully fixed IP, IPv6 support and DDOS protection.

In such a setup the service would degrade better, like images breaking, but the main service staying up when my home server goes down.

But it is not something I can setup now that the service is already inaccessible.

poVoq here. I am starting to think I am cursed, because everything works fine (or is at least fixable with a remote server restart) until the second I go on a longer business trip and can’t easily access the hardware.

Remote access is mostly lost, but I was able to triangulate the issue and of course it is something I had on my list of potential issues, but as a low priority item 🫠 At least it isn’t the same problem again as in 2025.

What exactly triggered the issue is unclear though. I was still able to access the reverse-proxy server yesterday (shortly before it went down) and tried to do some updates for that php security problem in a VM that runs on the same machine. I thought I had those covered, but there is a slight chance that it is related and someone chained another exploit to escape the VM.

Anyways, it looks like the realistic / not overly optimistic scenario is that the server will stay down until christmas. I did have someone who could restart the servers on site until this summer, but they had to relocate to mainland Portugal for job reasons (tourism sector) and so they will also only return for christmas.

So yeah, not great at all, and I will have to think more seriously about how compatible this kind of self-hosting is with my current job, which limits my access to the servers for a few weeks at least once a year. It was easier during the pandemic times when I started all this, as deployments were shorter and more seldom back then.

Thanks. Should be back in a few hours hopefully.

A KVM is basically a second computer that acts as a virtual screen and keyboard that can be connected to the server to remote control it as if you were physically in front of it, including hardware resets and access to the bios etc.

I bought a KVM for that purpose, but didn’t get around installing it.

The other person able to do it manually will be available the same time as me more or less so I don’t want to bother them.

Yeah, I need to work on the busfactor.

The last time it went down was a similar situation and all the stuff I planned to prevent it next time I procastrinated on because the server was stable 🤦

No one knows 🤷

It is a work trip to the middle east. I am unlucky with work trips and server maintenance 😓

poVoq here. After a string of bad luck it looks like I will not be able to get it back up before Tuesday evening. Super annoying.