When your server is under attack, "we're being DDoSed" is not actionable; "SYN flood, four million packets per second, spoofed sources, targeting port 443" is. The difference between the two is a thirty-second packet capture and a structured look at it. This guide covers capturing safely on a machine that's already saturated (tcpdump, not the Wireshark GUI), the triage workflow in Wireshark (Protocol Hierarchy, Conversations, I/O Graphs) and the display-filter signatures of the common attack vectors, ending with how to turn findings into mitigation.

Bare metal and dedicated server describe the same thing: one physical machine, rented whole, with no hypervisor and no other tenant on it. The confusion is not about the hardware. It is about which era of hosting vocabulary a provider is using, and that vocabulary tends to predict how the machine is sold to you: by ticket or by API, by the month or by the hour. This guide explains where each term came from, lays out the operating-model differences a provider's word choice usually signals, gives you five questions to ask before you order, and covers the one case where neither term is what you actually want.

Networking can feel intimidating at first, but with the right approach you can turn a simple virtual server into a capable routing backbone that spans from your home lab to a cloud VPS. This guide walks through building such a topology using VyOS. By the end you will have a home router, a public VPS router, a secure tunnel between them, and routing for multiple internal subnets.

CentOS Linux is gone (CentOS 8 reached end of life at the end of 2021 and CentOS 7 followed in mid-2024), and CentOS Stream is not a like-for-like replacement. The two real successors are AlmaLinux and Rocky Linux, and since 2023 they no longer work the same way under the hood: AlmaLinux targets ABI compatibility with RHEL, Rocky holds 1:1 binary parity. This guide explains what actually differs between them now, gives a conditions-based verdict instead of "it depends," and walks the real migration paths (migrate2rocky, almalinux-deploy, and ELevate for the CentOS 7 cross-major jump), including the pre-flight checklist, the inhibitor wall, and the rollback plan.

DDoS attacks come in three broad families: volumetric floods that saturate your pipe, protocol attacks that exhaust connection state, and application-layer floods that look like legitimate traffic. Each one exhausts a different resource, so each one needs a different defence, and no single layer stops all three. This guide maps the common attack forms to the resource they target and the mitigation that actually works against them, explains what an on-host firewall can and cannot stop, and ends with a practical incident-response runbook for when your server is under fire.