Linux has two different kinds of “used” memory. One is memory allocated for/by running processes that cannot be reclaimed or reallocated to another process. This memory is unavailable. The other kind is memory used for caching (ZFS, write-back cache, etc) that can be reclaimed and allocated for other things as needed. Memory that is not allocated in any way is free. Memory that is either free or allocated to cache is available.

It looks like htop only shows unavailable memory as “used”, while proxmox shows the sum of unavailable and cached memory. Proxmox “uses” 11 GB, but it’s not running out of memory because most of it is “available”.

Proxmox is a great starting point. I use it in my home server and at work. It’s built on Debian, with a web interface to manage your virtual machines and containers, the virtual network (trivial unless you need advanced features), virtual disks, and installer images. There are advanced options like clustering and high availability, but you really don’t have to interact with those unless you need them.

New developments: just a few hours before I post this comment, The Register posted an article about AI crawler traffic. https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/21/ai_crawler_traffic/

Anubis’ developer was interviewed and they posted the responses on their website: https://xeiaso.net/notes/2025/el-reg-responses/

In particular:

Fastly’s claims that 80% of bot traffic is now AI crawlers

In some cases for open source projects, we’ve seen upwards of 95% of traffic being AI crawlers. For one, deploying Anubis almost instantly caused server load to crater by so much that it made them think they accidentally took their site offline. One of my customers had their power bills drop by a significant fraction after deploying Anubis. It’s nuts.

So, yeah. If we believe Xe, OOP’s article is complete hogwash.

That’s why the developer is working on a better detection mechanism. https://xeiaso.net/blog/2025/avoiding-becoming-peg-dependency/

With how much authority you wrote with before, I thought you’d be able to grasp the concept. I’m sorry I assumed better.

THEN (and this is the part you don’t seem to understand) the client process has to waste time solving the challenge, which is, by the way, orders of magnitudes lighter on the server than serving the actual meaningful content, or cancel the request. If a new request is sent during that time, it will still have to waste time solving the challenge. The scraper will get through eventually, but the challenge delays the response and reduces the load on the server because while the scrapers are busy computing, it doesn’t have to serve meaningful content to them.

It’s not client-side because validation happens on the server side. The content won’t be displayed until and unless the server receives a valid response, and the challenge is formulated in such a way that calculating a valid answer will always take a long time. It can’t be spoofed because the server will know that the answer is bullshit. In my example, the server will know that the prime factors returned by the client are wrong because their product won’t be equal to the original semiprime. Delegating to a sub-process won’t work either, because what’s the parent process supposed to do? Move on to another piece of content that is also protected by Anubis?

The point is to waste the client’s time and thus reduce the number of requests the server has to handle, not to prevent scraping altogether.

That’s the great thing about Anubis: it’s not client-side. Not entirely anyways. Similar to public key encryption schemes, it exploits the computational complexity of certain functions to solve the challenge. It can’t just say “solved, let me through” because the client has to calculate a number, based on the parameters of the challenge, that fits certain mathematical criteria, and then present it to the server. That’s the “proof of work” component.

A challenge could be something like “find the two prime factors of the semiprime 1522605027922533360535618378132637429718068114961380688657908494580122963258952897654000350692006139”. This number is known as RSA-100, it was first factorized in 1991, which took several days of CPU time, but checking the result is trivial since it’s just integer multiplication. A similar semiprime of 260 decimal digits still hasn’t been factorized to this day. You can’t get around mathematics, no matter how advanced your AI model is.

The developer is working on upgrades and better tools. https://xeiaso.net/blog/2025/avoiding-becoming-peg-dependency/

The current version of Anubis was made as a quick “good enough” solution to an emergency. The article is very enthusiastic about explaining why it shouldn’t work, but completely glosses over the fact that it has worked, at least to an extent where deploying it and maybe inconveniencing some users is preferable to having the entire web server choked out by a flood of indiscriminate scraper requests.

The purpose is to reduce the flood to a manageable level, not to block every single scraper request.

You can go with Debian (or Devuan), easily. My home server is running Proxmox on metal (Debian-based itself), virtualized OPNSense, and multiple Debian containers on an i3-4150 and previously 4GB RAM (now mis-matched 10GB).

Debian is like that. Mature. The point releases are thoroughly tested for reliability, but the cost is that they can’t include bleeding edge software in the middle of the release cycle. The “stable” branch (currently Trixie) is always lagging behind, and the “testing” branch (Forky, next in line to become “stable”) will be frozen long before it is released.

You might want to try a rolling release distro. Arch Linux or something based on it (EndeavourOS, Garuda, CachyOS), or Debian Sid (the unstable branch).

Did Debian hurt you or something? You’re just raging for the sake of rage.

That’s bollocks. Bookworm has received 11 point release updates, and they were definitely not only security updates. Read through the the 12.1 release notes, for example. “Fix playing of custom alarm sounds” does not sound like a security fix, nor a severe issue.

Security updates are released frequently, often just days apart, to individual packages. https://www.debian.org/security/

Point release updates (12.1, 12.2, up to 12.11) are released several months apart. They are thoroughly tested and verified to work together.

Bro is also concerned about attacks on exposed well-known ports, in which case bro can use Tailscale Funnel to expose a service without exposing a port. Besides, bro can make up bro’s own mind.

Consider Tailscale. It’s a mesh VPN based on Wireguard that uses a hosted service to manage keys and devices. It works without having to expose any ports on the firewall, and can expose a service through a relay server.

Some people will say that you shouldn’t trust it because company bad, but you should give it a try and make up your own mind. If you’re feeling adventurous, you can install Headscale on a VPS to serve as a control server.

Do not pretend like Linus Sebastian is your tech illiterate grandmother. He’s a clown today, but he has had experience with computers in the past. Of all people, he should have known better.

I can’t believe it. The incident has actually been reported!

I don’t use Caddy, but it seems like it tried to generate and write a TLS certificate into /usr/local, but didn’t have the necessary permissions. Basically it tried to use sudo tee ... to write a file. Is Caddy running in a container? If it is, you might need to create a volume at /usr/local/share/ca-certificates. If not in a container, you’ll need to grant the caddy user write permissions in that directory.

But to answer your question directly, it’s not a cause for concern. You’re not getting hacked, it’s just a configuration error.

As I recall, the prompt was particularly clear about what was about to happen, hence the extra yes, do as I say! response. Linus was either too stupid or too arrogant to realize that he was out of his depth and should consult someone with more experience.

Ignorance and stupidity are very different things. This wasn’t a Chernobyl situation where the emergency scram button triggered a hidden flaw. This was a “PRESSING THIS BUTTON WILL IMMEDIATELY AND DEFINITIVELY NUKE, RUIN, DESTROY YOUR SYSTEM” situation.

Do not do that. You need to set up VLANs and proper separation between them on both the switch and the router, assuming the switch even supports tagged trunk lines. If you don’t, you’re just connecting all of your hosts to the unfiltered internet.