Another good reason not to open port 22 - eviltoast

In the past two weeks I set up a new VPS, and I run a small experiment. I share the results for those who are curious.

Consider that this is a backup server only, meaning that there is no outgoing traffic unless a backup is actually to be recovered, or as we will see, because of sshd.

I initially left the standard “port 22 open to the world” for 4-5 days, I then moved sshd to a different port (still open to the whole world), and finally I closed everything and turned on tailscale. You find a visualization of the resulting egress traffic in the image. Different colors are different areas of the world. Ignore the orange spikes which were my own ssh connections to set up stuff.

Main points:

  • there were about 10 Mb of egress per day due just to sshd answering to scanners. Not to mention the cluttering of access logs.

  • moving to a non standard port is reasonably sufficient to avoid traffic and log cluttering even without IP restrictions

  • Tailscale causes a bit of traffic, negligible of course, but continuous.

  • Saigonauticon@voltage.vnEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    Perhaps ironically, I live in a nominally Communist country that went through decolonization quite a number of times. It doesn’t change much in my daily life (I’m not really political), although I arguably own some tiny slice of the means of production these days. So maybe in retirement I’ll provide public access to those for working class people. That would be really fun, I think. Who knows what we might create together? Certainly if the machines are sitting unused in my retirement, they are creating nothing, and I would feel sad for the machines.

    I don’t do the whole 9-5 thing. That would stress me out! I work as long as I feel like, any day of the week I feel like. Generally, this is really nice for both managing stress (there’s always tomorrow!) and steamrolling over any competition.

    I’m just a mercenary (and a bureaucrat) though. You pay my fee in filthy lucre, and the job gets done – legally, and reliably. If someone annoys me with politics at a client, I just try and replace them with a computer program. The result is that several of my best coworkers are machines these days. I foresee that trend increasing with time.