fail2ban isn’t a WAF?

Out of curiosity why would you call Ceph a fake HCI? As far as I’ve seen, it behaves akin to any of the other HCI systems I’ve used.

Not all of them. Ceph on Proxmox and (iirc) VMware vSAN run bare metal. That statement was a call-out post for Nutanix, which runs their storage inside a VM cluster. Both of these have been doing so for years.

Reddit is large enough that this would usually have ended up on one of the anime subs or technology joke subs rather than the general comics community.

Depends on the campaign. One of my favorite characters to play is a INT/DEX artificer who got roped into somehow being in charge of saving the world.