RDP brute-force traffic is relentless and largely automated. An exposed Windows Server on a public IP will typically see its first credential-guessing attempts within hours of going live, and the pattern is repetitive: a few thousand attempts against Administrator from a handful of /24s, then a pause, then a shift to the RDP port if … Read more
ASP.NET Core does not run inside IIS. It runs as a separate out-of-process dotnet worker, and IIS sits in front of it as a reverse proxy using the ASP.NET Core Module (ANCM). Understanding that one sentence explains almost every deployment failure administrators hit on Windows: the 500.30, the 502.5, the app that works with dotnet … Read more
Sysmon extends the Windows event log with process creation, network connection, file creation, and registry events that carry hashes, parent process lineage, and full command lines — the telemetry that native auditing omits. Deploying it on a Windows Server is straightforward; tuning it so it produces an analysable volume on a small VPS is the … Read more
SMB signing and SMB encryption are the two controls that determine whether your file traffic on a Windows Server can be tampered with or read in transit — and both cost measurable throughput. The engineering question is not “enable them” but “which one, at what settings, and what does the CPU chart look like afterwards.” … Read more
Memory Integrity, the user-facing switch for Hypervisor-Enforced Code Integrity, moves kernel-mode code-integrity checks into a virtual trust level that the guest kernel cannot write to. On a VPS nested inside a hypervisor, that means a second layer of translation and a measurable penalty on older CPUs without the right extent-table features. This article measures the … Read more
IIS routes URLs through NTFS, and NTFS treats /Products and /products as the same file. That is convenient on a case-insensitive filesystem and a source of subtle bugs when URL rewrite rules, canonical-host redirects, and application routes are written with case-sensitive assumptions copied from Linux. The result is often a rewrite loop that returns 500.19 … Read more
DHCP is one of those roles that everyone uses and few people configure deliberately. A default installation hands out addresses, but it also hands out your old DNS server, the wrong gateway, and a lease time that starves your subnet of free IPs. On a Windows server instance used as an internal network service, a … Read more
On a Remote Desktop Session Host, roaming profiles and folder redirection were the traditional answer to “users must see the same desktop on every host.” Both are slow, both corrupt state on logoff, and both struggle with applications that write to AppData. FSLogix replaces them with a container approach: each user’s entire profile lives in … Read more
Storage Spaces is Microsoft’s software-defined storage layer, built into Windows Server, and it is the first thing many administrators reach for when a VPS needs a redundant disk pool. The obvious question — how does it compare to hardware or firmware RAID — has a genuinely practical answer on a virtual machine, and it is … Read more
Windows Server licensing on a VPS confuses administrators because two different models collide. Retail and volume licensing prices Windows Server by the physical core, and that is the model most guides describe. SPLA — the Services Provider License Agreement — is the model hosting providers actually use, and it prices by the month, per user … Read more