Tell HN: Linode's Abuse form is absolute garbage
We are getting a lot of abuse traffic from Linode lately and it is absolutely frustrating filling out their abuse form: https://www.linode.com/legal-abuse/
- There is no option for DDOS.
- If you make a mistake and need to click back all the filled out data is gone
- You can only report 1 IP at a time
- The confirmation mail is full of errors such as listing Name as "First Name" as in the field description and not what I entered.
- The confirmation mail comes from "[email protected]"
- No ability to attach for example a pcap file
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I have some dirt-cheap $5 VMs that I use for banging around, but for anything important I pay extra for machines that are backed by actual support. You hope that you never need it, but when you need it, you really need it.
When ran into an early issue during our first few days and the support technician assigned to the ticket solved the problem. Then write back a few hours later with a change that he attributed to a colleague with whom he was chatting about it.
We haven’t had to call for support yet, but the number is in my contacts for when that day might come. We’ve been much happier than on EC2. We are spending about the same per month with much more to show for it in terms of our user-facing results.
That's nothing compared to Cloudflare.
Try to make 500+ with Cloudflare and tell me your thoughts on it. They are legit protecting piracy and turning a profit from it.
I've sent them +500 copyright claims over the years. It's really complicated, slow and they never take any action against these sites even after 10+ valid claims.
There's no way to follow tickets. The process requires an online form to be filled then follow-ups are by email (with no way to see the status of tickets). Tracking these claims one-by-one is the hardest I've ever seen because you don't get a ticket number after you fill the online form or get an email right away. You have to manually follow them up.
The process has never been updated to be easier for the end-user in 8+ years (since my first DMCA abuse report).
CloudFlare is pretty much the worst company I can think of. Blocking harmless Tor and VPN users through unsolvable captchas on every website they "protect", while talking about an open Internet and freedom of speech. These hypocrites only block websites if they get some cheap PR, in reality they give a shit offering their services to criminals.
Second only to China’s major networks is quite an achievement!
https://viz.greynoise.io/query/?gnql=last_seen%3A1d
Out of curiosity, what types of attacks are you receiving? e.g.
- packet rate / packets-per-second
- average mss of the tcp syn packets / number of tcp syn's missing mss. - average length of the udp packets - NIC saturating volumetric attack? - Number of AS numbers these are distributed acrossI ask because I have seen an uptick in incredibly odd port scans that seem to just repeat. They are harmless but make tcpdump really noisy. If you give me some general numbers on the above questions I might be able to suggest some generalized mitigations assuming the numbers are small enough. Most that I am seeing come from 103/8, some from a server reseller in the Netherlands and some come from Tor exit nodes suggesting to me someone is trying to break Tor. This is not specific to Linode, I am seeing this on 3 VPS providers.
If most of what you are seeing are TCP packets missing mss, take a look at this thread [1]. If most of the packets are UDP, first look at the legit size of UDP packets of the applications on your server, then use the "length" iptables module to DROP anything that does not match your traffic pattern.
[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33129508
Linode has been pretty vocal that DDoS protection at their edge has been included, from before the Akamai acquisition.
At this point I just drop both at the edge as they generally refuse to deal with problems and especially in the case of "researchers" who don't identify themselves, protect them.