From 7390cc2e13a51bd52bf05959293223082a7e4f34 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: =?UTF-8?q?Gina=20H=C3=A4u=C3=9Fge?= <gina@foosel.net>
Date: Mon, 1 Jul 2024 21:46:00 +0200
Subject: [PATCH] til: cloud ip check for nginx

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+---
+title: "How to check for cloud IPs in nginx"
+date: 2024-07-01
+tags:
+- nginx
+- bash
+---
+
+I'm currently busy mitigating a [stats manipulation on OctoPrint](https://octoprint.org/blog/2024/06/28/stats-manipulation/), and one of the steps I'm taking is blocking off several cloud options from accessing the tracking endpoint - and *only* that.
+
+Since we are talking about several thousand of IPs here in at least 1.5k of CIDR ranges, I was looking for the best way to do that that wouldn't cause a lot of performance impact - the tracking server needs to be fast. 
+
+A list of all CIDR ranges with `deny` turned out to not work thanks to my endpoint definition in nginx using `return` statements, and those are apparently evaluated before `allow` and `deny` statements. But then I got the hint to look at the [`geo` module](https://nginx.org/en/docs/http/ngx_http_geo_module.html) and with that it was easy to build a map of IP ranges that should be matched and just combining that with an `if`. 
+
+For a first test I created a converter for [this list of IP ranges](https://github.com/PodderApps/ipcat), filtering for the really big players: 
+
+``` bash
+#!/bin/bash
+
+URL=https://raw.githubusercontent.com/PodderApps/ipcat/main/datacenters.csv
+
+if [ $1 != "" ]; then
+	DATA=$(curl -s $URL | grep -E "$1")
+else
+	DATA=$(curl -s $URL)
+fi
+
+
+echo 'geo $is_cloud {'
+echo '    default 0;'
+
+while IFS= read -r line; do
+	start_ip=$(echo $line | cut -d, -f1)
+	end_ip=$(echo $line | cut -d, -f2)
+	comment=$(echo $line | cut -d, -f3)
+
+	script="import ipaddress; start_ip=ipaddress.IPv4Address(\"$start_ip\"); end_ip=ipaddress.IPv4Address(\"$end_ip\"); print(next(ipaddress.summarize_address_range(start_ip, end_ip)))"
+	cidr=$(python3 -c "$script")
+
+	echo "    $cidr 1; # $comment"
+done <<< "$DATA"
+
+echo '}'
+
+```
+
+Calling this like this then created a `conf` file:
+
+``` prompt
+$ sudo ./generate_is_cloud_map "AWS|DigitalOcean|Google" > /etc/nginx/snippets/is-cloud.conf
+$ cat /etc/nginx/snippets/ip-cloud.conf
+geo $is_cloud {
+    default 0;
+    3.0.0.0/15; # Amazon AWS
+    # ...
+}
+```
+
+which I then could use in my nginx `location` config through an include and an `if` statement: 
+
+``` nginx
+include snippets/is-cloud.conf;
+
+# ...
+
+server {
+    location /mylocation {
+        if ($is_cloud = 1) {
+            return 403;
+        }
+        # ...
+    }
+}
+```
+
+For now this seems to work. I'm going to give this a day or so and then look into further IP sources and also blocking off the IPv6 ranges.