A freshly provisioned server starts receiving SSH probes within minutes of its IP going live — honeypot studies show most exposed machines are attacked within a day. The good news: the defences that matter are a short, boring, one-hour checklist, not a security research project. This guide walks the eight steps in order — users and SSH keys, firewall baseline, automatic updates, fail2ban, time sync, a listener audit, and logging — with the exact commands for Debian/Ubuntu and the RHEL family, plus an honest list of what not to waste your first hour on.

Connecting multiple office sites or datacenters securely and efficiently is a critical challenge for modern businesses. Traditional VPN solutions like IPsec or OpenVPN can be complex to configure and maintain, especially in multi-site environments. WireGuard offers a lightweight, fast alternative that's easier to set up. VyOS 1.5 fully supports WireGuard, making it an excellent choice for organizations looking to interconnect multiple datacenters or sites. In this guide, we'll show you how to set up a site-to-site WireGuard tunnel on VyOS 1.5. We'll cover routing, firewall configuration, and best practices. By the end, your sites will be securely connected over the internet with traffic routed effectively between LANs.

Ubuntu is built from Debian, so this is a comparison between close relatives — same package format, same init system, largely the same administration. The real differences are cadence, support windows, kernel freshness, and who stands behind the updates: a fixed two-year LTS rhythm with optional paid coverage to 2036, versus a community release that's done when it's done and free forever. This guide lays out what the two actually share, where they genuinely differ, and which server workloads favour which — with current versions and support dates, not folklore.

Three Ubuntu LTS releases are in service right now: 22.04 approaching the end of standard support, 24.04 in its comfortable middle years, and the new 26.04 "Resolute Raccoon" with Linux 7.0. Which one belongs on your server depends on where you are in the cycle — and the answer is different for new deploys and existing fleets. This guide gives the support-window table, what actually changed in 26.04 for server operators, the honest reasons to stay on 24.04 for now, and the upgrade mechanics — including the August 2026 date when the LTS-to-LTS path opens.