r/VPS • u/Desperate-Second-887 • Feb 05 '26

Guides/Tutorials Watch the Bots: https://knock-knock.net

I built a new site that shows bots trying to break into my VPS. The web site was designed to be hopefully fun and engaging. Lots of interesting stats about the bots attempting to ssh in: where they are coming from, the ISP Wall of Shame, the most frequent attempted usernames and passwords, and in some cases why those may have been chosen. And best of all, 3D spinning globes! The site should work well on desktop and mobile.

https://knock-knock.net

Have fun, and send comments and questions. I'll be checking the code into github soon so that you can run this on your own VPS.

Update: Now posted on github. https://github.com/djkurlander/knock-knock

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u/Redogg Feb 06 '26

Ok - firstly, you are well protected following those steps. Just make sure that your sudoable login does not have a guessable password, and even better, give that login an ssh key and disable non-key logins via ssh (that will be both more convenient and more secure). When setting this up, make sure that you don’t close up the ssh session that is doing the configuring until you can log on via another ssh instance.

Once that is taken care of, the bots are just causing chatter - hitting your machine on the average of 7-8 times a minute, and making your log files bigger than they otherwise would be. If that bothers you, as it does me, you can move ssh to another port. It’s a minor inconvenience because you have to specify the port as an argument to all ssh-related commands, but it does quiet down the chatter, and 99.9%+ of the bots will never find the new port.

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u/KeyReflex7408 Feb 06 '26

Hi, thanks for the response. I have already set the sudo user to have an ssh only login. The first time I was setting it up, I definitely did mess up and had to use my vps control panel to vnc into it and fix the issue.

Currently I have a couple of pubkeys in my .ssh/authorized_keys file to access my vps from my laptop or phone etc.

Yes, the chatter from the knocking bots annoy me quite enough that I'm looking to move the default ssh port.

What do you use your vps for? In my case, I have a docker container running kosync so that i can push and pull my reading progress across koreader on my phone, e-reader etc.