We use NGINX’s 444 on every LLM crawler we see.

Caddy has a similar “close connection” option called “abort” as part of the static response.

HAProxy has the “silent-drop” option which also closes the TCP connection silently.

I’ve found crawling attempts end more quickly using this option - especially attacks - but my sample size is relatively small.

Edit: we do this because too often we’ve seen them ignore robots.txt. They believe all data is theirs. I do not.

Ran WireGuard on a Pi1 and it was fine for two users. Albeit WireGuard was the ONLY thing running aside from a Gitlab Runner.

A 4b should be more than enough for many use cases except things that cause torrents of packets - but even then YMMV. It really depends on the workload.

One bit of advice: if you can, use a storage device other than the micro-sd slot for the 4B. Again YMMV.