Long story short, my VPS, which I’m forwarding my servers through Tailscale to, got hammered by thousands of requests per minute from Anthropic’s Claude AI. All of which being from different AWS IPs.

The VPS has a 1TB monthly cap, but it’s still kinda shitty to have huge spikes like the 13GB in just a couple of minutes today.

How do you deal with something like this?
I’m only really running a caddy reverse proxy on the VPS which forwards my home server’s services through Tailscale. "

I’d really like to avoid solutions like Cloudflare, since they f over CGNAT users very frequently and all that. Don’t think a WAF would help with this at all(?), but rate limiting on the reverse proxy might work.

(VPS has fail2ban and I’m using /etc/hosts.deny for manual blocking. There’s a WIP website on my root domain with robots.txt that should be denying AWS bots as well…)

I’m still learning and would really appreciate any suggestions.

  • rumba
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    6 hours ago

    There’s more than one style of tar pit. In this case you obviously wouldn’t want to use an endless maze style.

    What you want to do in this case is send them through an HA proxy that would redirect them on user agent, whenever they come in as Claude you send them over to a box running on a Wanem process at modem speeds.

    They’ll immediately realize they’ve got a hug of death going on and give up.