It’s currently a N100 mini-pc running Debian, but in the past it’s been all kinds of random hardware including a busted old laptop with an expresscard-PCIe riser for the second NIC. Anything can be a router if you know what you’re doing!
There’s probably a bunch of permissions errors, filesystems warnings for cross-filesystem mounts or links, etc. all going to stderr. Linux output streams are a bit odd, 1 is stdout and 2 is stderr. So the command is redirecting the “noise” to null and just printing the actual command output. That would be my assessment, but OP could probably give a more correct answer…!
A very effective first step is to put it on a vhost with a domain you control, and drop traffic to the default vhost. 99.999% of scanners are just going through IPs looking for stuff, so don’t give them anything. Better yet, block any IP that scans you more than a dozen or so times.
Obviously some stuff will find you through cert issuance logs, but most of the bastards don’t bother with that level of sophistication.
The cool thing is that you can make basically any combination of parts into a router if you install Linux or BSD on it. Not terribly helpful for end user consumers that will get shafted by this, but at the end of the day it’s just a small computer.
Otherwise, smuggle some “foreign routers” in from Mexico or Canada like it’s the prohibition era?
Thanks!