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Comment on CrowdSec vs Fail2Ban - What to use?

As you probably know the crowdsec bouncer doesn’t directly parse logs or do checks like F2B filters. It queries the crowdsec LAPI for decisions and applies them. The “allowed” or “whitelisted” IP logic is handled at the Security Engine or LAPI level, not by the bouncer itself.

You can whitelist an ip in /etc/crowdsec/whitelists.yaml or even whitelist decisions in the whitelist.yaml as such:

name: private-ips
description: Whitelist local and private IPs
whitelist:
  reason: "Allow local and private IPs"
  ip:
    - "127.0.0.1"
    - "192.168.1.0/24"
  cidr:
    - "10.0.0.0/8"

Then issue sudo systemctl reload crowdsec. Kind of the same concept as F2B’s ignoreip option. If you are using Tailscale to administer the server, then it’s easier to whitelist. IIRC, you can use cscli decisions add --type whitelist --ip 192.168.1.100 --duration 1y but it doesn’t add them to the whitelist.yaml. Instead it keeps them in crowdsec’s database managed by LAPI. To undo: cscli decisions delete --ip 192.168.1.100 --type whitelist

docs.crowdsec.net/u/…/whitelists/

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Matty_r@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

With the bouncer setup, I assume I need to pass in where to look for logs or something for those to be passed into the lapi? I followed this CrowdSec and Nginx Proxy Manager , as far as I can tell everything is connected an running, I have crowdsec running on OpnSense via the plugin - it appears to be healthy as per the CrowdSec Console.

npm  | [nginx       ] nginx: [error] [lua] crowdsec.lua:62: init(): error loading captcha plugin: no recaptcha site key provided, can't use recaptcha       
npm  | [nginx       ] nginx: [error] [lua] ban.lua:37: new(): BAN_TEMPLATE_PATH and REDIRECT_LOCATION variable are empty, will return HTTP 403 for ban decisions
npm  | [nginx       ] nginx: [alert] [lua] crowdsec_openresty.conf:5):11: [Crowdsec] Initialisation done                                                    
npm  | [supervisor  ] starting service 'app'...                                                                                                             
npm  | [app         ] [5/5/2025] [11:26:30 PM] [Global   ] › ℹ  info      Using Sqlite: /data/database.sqlite                                               
npm  | [supervisor  ] all services started.

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irmadlad@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
Hey bro. I apologize for getting back to you so late. Did you ever get this resolved? I’m not hugely knowledgeable about the intricacies of nginx. I went with Caddy, but there is probably some commonality between the two. lmk

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- Matty_r@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  All good, yea its because I need crowdsec installed on the proxy as well - not just the bouncer - in order to actually send the logs to Opnsense.
  
  I ended up having some weird performance issues so I pulled it all out for now and will revisit another time.
  
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