Whilst I agree on the glue records, DNSSEC is most definitely included as standard (check my domain itsg.host which is on a free account)

That I very much agree with, CloudFlare is great, but it certainly isn’t for every use case nor should it be. Thats kinda the entire point I was trying to make.

Well I was expecting some form of notification for replies, but still, seen it now.

My understanding of this is limited having mostly gotten as far as you have and been satisfied.

For other bouncers, there’s actually a few decisions you can apply. By default the only decision is BAN which as the name suggests just outright blocks the IP at whatever level your bouncer runs at (L4 for firewall and L7 for nginx). The nginx bouncer can do more thought with CAPTCHA or CHALLENGE decisions to allow false alerts to still access your site. I tried writing something similar for traefik but haven’t deployed anything yet to comment further.

Wih updates, I don’t have them on automated, but I do occasionally go in and run a manual update when I remember (usually when I upgrade my OPNSense firewall that’s runs it). I don’t think it’s a bad idea at all to automate them, however the attack vectors don’t change that often. One thing to note, newer scenarios only run on the latest agent, something I discovered recently when trying to upgrade. I believe it will refuse to update them if it would cause them to break in this way, but test it yourself before enabling corn

Seconded, not only is CrowdSec a hell of a lot more resource efficient (Go vs Python IIRC), having it download a list of known bad actors for you in advance really slows down what it needs to process in the first place. I’ve had servers DDoSed just by fail2ban trying to process the requests.