exxos's Atari, Amiga & retro forum

So annoyingly there is a "bug" in CleanTalks firewall somewhere.. I have opened up a ticket about it.. And had to disable it for now..

Also had to fiddle with the firewall again because its only set to a IP limit of a million IP addresses for the blacklist. Then Fail2ban started churning out errors because it could not add more IPs to the blacklist because it was basically full :roll: So now I have increased the blacklist size to 5 million IP's.

Because its getting rather ridiculous about the amount of IPs which are being banned individually, GPT5 is writing a script for me which will scan the blacklist and find clusters of IP addresses within a similar range, it will just outright ban the range in a second blacklist and then remove the original individual IP is from the original blacklist. This will basically stop the blacklist from getting stupidly large.

I didn't want to start blocking entire ranges like this, but it has become a necessity at this point. I'm only blocking the /24 range at the moment but I may have to tighten up on that at a later date as well. Of course the higher the range I ban, the more chance there will be of collateral damage I think..

A "annoyance" with fail2ban is it doesn't seem to respect the limit of only storing ips in its database for 1 hour :shrug:. So the problem is when it is restarted, it then restores bans from its own database which can literally be millions of IPs. There is actually no point in doing that in my setup because I am just permanently banning IPs anyway now.

But after talking to Grok, it said I can have the database in memory, so when fail2ban restarts, it's database is lost. So then it cannot restore the IPs when it doesn't know what they are. This is a much more efficient system because restoring a million IPs can take several hours and it really hammers the CPU. The side effect problem is all those IP addresses then get reported to the abuse site which just takes a lot of CPU time and is just pointless anyway.

The consolidation script is now done and IP ranges get transferred over to a new block list and original single IP addresses get deleted from the first black list. This should help keep the lists a lot shorter in the future.

Clean talk replied to my question and said they would get back to me in a couple of days after they talked to their development department.. I'll probably end up fixing it myself again.. We shall see...

My mobile IP address seems to have been banned. Site works ok on WiFi, not in Mobile

alexh wrote: 10 Aug 2025 09:15 My mobile IP address seems to have been banned. Site works ok on WiFi, not in Mobile

You can unban yourself from the ipban check page.

Odd though as forum users get whitelisted as long as your logged in for a few hours.

The new IP banning subnets seems to have had a good impact. There was around 5,000 IPs banned per hour.. It reduced to 1,000 ips per hour.. Now the logs are more like 100 IPs per hour. I wouldn't have thought it would have such a drastic impact on reducing ips but it has!

alexh wrote: 10 Aug 2025 09:15 My mobile IP address seems to have been banned. Site works ok on WiFi, not in Mobile

Just seeing this issue on my phone too (for a couple of days now).

Will try unbanning myself... posting from the phone while on WIFI first...

JezC wrote: 12 Aug 2025 13:17 Just seeing this issue on my phone too (for a couple of days now).

Will try unbanning myself... posting from the phone while on WIFI first...

A lot of new rules have been added the past few days..

Using the un-ban page, I get sent the IP address the diagnostic reports relating to the IP address so I can look into it..

exxos wrote: 12 Aug 2025 13:19

JezC wrote: 12 Aug 2025 13:17 Just seeing this issue on my phone too (for a couple of days now).

Will try unbanning myself... posting from the phone while on WIFI first...

A lot of new rules have been added the past few days..

Using the un-ban page, I get sent the IP address the diagnostic reports relating to the IP address so I can look into it..

Just trying to find the URL to try and unban myself...but not many search results on this forum... 8-S

JezC wrote: 12 Aug 2025 13:21 Just trying to find the URL to try and unban myself...but not many search results on this forum... 8-S

Its in my signature..

and on every forum section

@exxos You beat me to it: Unban/IP Check