Being a Rust server administrator or owner requires a strong command of essential admin controls and keybinds to effectively manage your server. Our detailed guide provides an assortment of valuable commands designed to improve your gameplay and elevate your server management abilities. Although the keybinds in this guide are tailored for the numpad, you can modify them to your liking or input the commands directly into the console if you don't have a keybind available. Let's explore these game-changing commands!

bind keypad2 ent unlock
bind keypad3 ent lock
bind keypad4 ent who
bind keypad5 ent auth
bind keypad6 teleport2marker
bind keypad7 debug.ambientvolumestoggle "False"
bind keypad8 admintime 12
bind keypad9 admintime -1
bind c teleportlos```

Boost Visibility with Asset Toggle Commands:

Concealing unnecessary in-game assets can help you more easily identify players in bases, dense foliage, or monitor their viewing angles for possible cheating. Use the command below to toggle different assets:

bind keypad1 layer.toggle Tree;layer.toggle World;layer.toggle Construction;layer.toggle Water;layer.toggle Terrain;layer.toggle Clutter

Manipulate CodeLocks and KeyLocks:

These handy commands allow you to unlock or lock the codelocks/keylocks you're currently looking at. While not frequently used, they can be useful in certain situations:

Unlock:
bind keypad2 ent unlock

Lock:
bind keypad3 ent lock

Determine Entity Ownership:

Efficiently ascertain the owner of an entity with this command, which will display the information in the F1 console:

bind keypad4 ent who

Examine Entity Authorization:

To find out who has authorized access to specific entities like tool cupboards and codes, use the command below. The F1 console will display the relevant information:

bind keypad5 ent auth

Swift Navigation with Teleport Commands:

Navigate the map quickly using this convenient command. Set a marker on the map and execute the following:

bind keypad6 teleport2marker

You can also teleport across an area by simply looking in a specific direction and pressing a key, similar to a teleportation device:

bind c teleportlos

Optimize Cave Visibility:

Remove the darkness in caves for improved visibility using this straightforward command:

bind keypad7 debug.ambientvolumestoggle "False"

Admin Time Control:

Change the time to daytime for yourself, without impacting other players, by executing this command:

bind keypad8 admintime 12

To return to the server's default time, use:

bind keypad9 admintime -1

Conclusion:

Equipped with these potent Rust server admin commands, you can streamline server management and upgrade your overall gameplay. Personalize the key binds to suit your needs and revel in the heightened control and convenience these commands offer.

For more in-depth information and additional benefits of commands, check out these helpful resources:

https://www.corrosionhour.com/rust-admin-commands/https://wiki.facepunch.com/rust/

• Identify the purpose of your rust server: Do you want to create a server for casual gameplay with friends, or are you looking to build a large community and offer a more competitive experience? Knowing your goals will help you determine the resources you need and the type of hosting provider you should choose.
• Consider the number of players: Depending on the hosting provider and server package you choose, you'll have to decide on the number of players you want to accommodate. Keep in mind that more players will require more resources and may result in higher costs along with the configuration you decide to go with such as plugins and mods.
• Think about the type of gameplay experience you want to offer: Do you want to offer a vanilla rust experience, or are you interested in adding custom maps, plugins, and other features to enhance the gameplay? This will impact the resources you need and the hosting provider you should consider.
• Assess your budget and time commitment: Hosting a rust server can be a time-consuming and potentially costly endeavor. Determine how much money and time you are willing to invest in order to determine the right hosting provider and server package for your needs.

Find a hosting provider:

• Research your options: There are many hosting providers that offer rust server hosting, so it's important to do your research and compare options. Look for providers that offer a variety of server packages, fast hardware, low latency, and reliable support.
• Read reviews and ask for recommendations: Look for reviews and testimonials from other rust server owners to get an idea of the quality of service and support offered by different hosting providers. You can also ask for recommendations in rust community forums or discord groups.
• Consider the type of support offered: It's important to choose a hosting provider that offers reliable support, as you may encounter issues or have questions during the setup and management of your server. Look for providers that offer 24/7 support and have a track record of quick response times.
• Tempest Hosting:  We offer a variety of server packages, fast hardware, low latency, and 24/7 support and the largest capacity for mitigating and protecting against DDoS attacks.

Set up your server:

• Install the rust server software: Your hosting provider will typically provide instructions on how to set up the rust server or configure your server via your panel, which is necessary to run your server. Rustafied provided an excellent article that features the exact steps to manually set up your own dedicated server environment you should check it out!
• Configure the server settings: After installing the applicable software for your dedicated server, or updating your server from within your panel, you'll need to configure the server settings to your desired specifications. This may include setting the server name, password, and rules, as well as selecting the map and game mode. Your hosting provider should provide guidance on how to do this.
• Test your server: Once your server is set up, it's a good idea to test it to ensure it is running smoothly and all settings are correct. You can do this by joining the server and verifying that everything is functioning as expected. To connect, simple hit the F1 key on your keyboard to open the console, then paste connect YOURSERVERIP:YOURPORT and then it'll connect you. Here's an example: connect 123.45.67.890:28015

Customize your server:

• Add custom maps and plugins: If you want to offer a more customized rust experience, you can add custom maps and plugins to your server. There are many resources available online that can help you do this, including forums, tutorials, and discord groups, including an article we wrote called Hosting a Custom Map on a Rust Server.
• Establish server rules: It's a good idea to establish clear rules for your server to ensure a fair and enjoyable gameplay experience for all players. Consider factors such as cheating, harassment, and other behavior that could disrupt the server.

Helpful Resources

Welcome

Welcome to the Rust Wiki. It’s 5 years too late, but its finally here.We expect to use this as a place to document new features as we go along and try to explain older features. If you log in, you can help us do that - it would be very much appreciate..

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Let's go over what FiveM is along with what our custom filter entails and how we mitigated the largest DDoS attack we've seen yet within our FiveM client base!

What is FiveM?

FiveM is a community-driven, modified version of Grand Theft Auto that allows users to create their own servers to host to the world. With nearly endless possibilities at your disposal regarding gameplay, you can host a server for yourself, friends, or the world as a whole such as events, custom game modes, and more!

Our FiveM Filter

The FiveM filter offers full coverage against DDoS attacks targeting the CitizenFX server, including protection for both TCP and UDP traffic. Like almost all of Path’s other filters, our stateful mitigation strategies are employed to provide unmatched DDoS filtering capabilities, allowing us to catch even the most sophisticated attacks without any impact to the customer. This is almost all implemented using eBPF/XDP to provide line-rate packet processing speeds for FiveM traffic.

In English, it means this particular DDoS attack won't stand a chance. Let's chat about that!

The DDoS Attack

On September 1st, 2022 we receive the attack shown below which was exactly at 1000Gbps / 1 Tbps. With a duration of roughly 90 seconds, the DDoS was quite short-lived. The best part of it was that none of our customers were affected, in fact, they weren't even aware an attack even happened from the ones we spoke with!

Get in touch with us!

Chat with the team on our Discord!

We're a proud hosting provider for the OTFGaming team that is hosting a FiveM server for Lil Durk!

Before we begin with this exciting news, this is a very bold claim so we'll carefully go over how we got here and the data to back it up! We are incredibly proud to say that per-player population within the game of Rust we are the number one server provider out there! Let's get started by going over who we are, displaying the facts, and if this means you'll have just as much success as a majority of our customers have experienced.

Who is Tempest Hosting?

We are a forward-thinking and innovation-driven server provider hosted on the most powerful network available, Path.net, which has easily overtaken some of the largest attacks with minimal, or zero impact to any customers as well as their players! Originated in Phoenix Arizona in early 2020 with other headquarters worldwide, the birth of Tempest has wildly shook the scene in such a short period of its existence, primarily due to our incredibly high expectation of consistency, reliability, and customer support in every aspect of our business!

Lastly, our network and team aren't the only things we have high expectations for but as well our hardware and datacenters at which they're stored! We utilize what's referred to as tier 4 datacenters which in short means they're the best of the best. On a total scale of 4 different data center types, tier 4 is the most tolerable to anything such as power reliability, cooling, staffing, and much more which is why we only use them!

"Best" is a big claim! Show me the Facts

You're right! Let's get to the details.

Below you'll see a graph of the current top hosts within Rust. This visual indicates the player count at which each host holds within Rust specifically. At a lower amount of total servers deployed at a total of 197 machines to customers, Tempest still wildly holds the highest player count! This means on average our machines hold 83 players per machine! A few of those customers have even surpassed an incredible feat of over 1000 players within their server at once!

We will add, that the other hosts do have impressive stats as well as we understand what it takes to get to these values. Hats off to the ones mentioned as well within this Rust-specific topic!

So I'll have a populated Rust server with Tempest?

Nobody can promise such a claim as ensuring that you'll have a population if you use their service. With that said, we personally can ensure that you'll be within the majority that does experience success and will experience our groundbreaking network and DDoS defensive network in addition to our awesome team at Tempest and Path!

Get in touch with us!

Check out our services and available machines at Tempest.net
Chat with the team on our Discord!

Hosting your first server can be a hectic and also rewarding time depending on how you pursue it! Hopefully, after this guide, you will be well informed on the basics and must-knows when hosting your very first server. This article will feature the game Rust by Facepunch Studios, however, most aspects can be carried over into many other games. We'll also be featured today by SRTBull's Youtube video which is a great visual aid to help get you started! We will follow the following format below.

1. Hosting Methods
2. Hosting your own server on your machine
3. Hosting from a service provider company
4. Recommended Hosts

Hosting Methods

There are primarily two methods when hosting a server which is listed below.

1. Seft-Hosted - A PC or server you own yourself that is capable of running a Rust server hosted from yourself.
2. Hosting Provider - A company or organization that rents out servers for clients to use.

We will first go over Self-Hosted server hosting as it's the cheapest, but also a good method to get started before fully dipping your toes in.

Self-Hosting Your Rust Server

SRTBull on Youtube if you haven't already heard of it, makes great how-to Rust admin videos that you should definitely check out! In the video mentioned below, he will be going over how to host your very own Self Hosted Rust server on your own pc.

Note: It's not advised to host a public server from your home network. If you plan to do so then be mindful that it can potentially put your home network at risk if you upset anyone or are a target for getting DDoS'd at all.

Host Provider Servers

As mentioned hosting providers offer a service, typically on a monthly payment plan for you to rent out a server of your liking. Hosting companies typically offer two main packages, one is Shared-Hosting, and the other is Dedicated Hosting.

• Shared-Hosting - Basically it's sharing a single machine for multiple people and dividing it up evenly, usually catered for a specific game via a built-in panel. Nobody other than yourself has access to your own server files as the machine is split up through an interactive and easy-to-use panel, typically. This is a great budget-friendly method, especially starting off. ($10-100 per month average)
• MicroCloud Hosting (Blades) - If you're wanting a perfect middle-ground machine that's not overkilling, but also more performant than the shared hosting hardware that is typically limited once you gain popularity then a 'Blade' server would be the best middle-ground machine for all-around use or hosting! It's worth noting that you do have full access to these machines generally and do not share them with other clients. ($80-300 per month average)
• Dedicated Hosting - Grants you full access to the machine yielding much higher performance since you utilize the machine entirely to your own servers. These typically do not come with an easy-to-use panel and the price will be considerably higher than shared hosting. ($100-500 per month average)

What hosting provider do we recommend and why?

• Tempest.net

Sounding biased here, however, we are extremely confident within our service and network that we do believe we are the most premium server hosting experience out there whilst remaining within a budget-friendly manner for people like ourselves who are hobbyist gamers wanting an affordable game-server hosting option.

What makes Tempest Hosting the best?

Hands down the most innovative and large-scale network out there is Path.net, which is the foundation of the service at which we offer which will ensure that your machine has the best possible DDoS and network protection that you can get. In addition, we only exclusively host all of our hardware in the highest tier data center facilities possible which includes multiple redundancy plans with power, hardware cooling, and overall extremely high uptime on all of our machines due to minimal faults. We are a premium server provider, but the price does follow the quality hosting and customer experience we try our best to offer!

Hosting a Rust server can undoubtedly come with its challenges by itself, especially just learning all of the options, variables, commands, and more! Today we're going to make a very digestible guide on hosting a custom map on your server in just 3 simple steps!

#1 - Locate/Obtain A Custom Map

There are several ways to acquire custom map files. First and foremost, you can have your own custom map generated from Rustmaps.com using their custom map generator tool which can offer many QOL features such as the removal/adding of certain monuments and more.

The second method is to make your own custom map, my personal favorite! The most common way is to create a map using Rustedit. A great into this would be referring to SRTBull's video.

The third and final method is downloading/purchasing pre-made custom maps from various sources that map makers and artists create! A couple resources we'll mention is Lone.Design and Codefling.com

#2 - Acquire A URL For Your Custom Map

In order for the server to boot the map, it must first read it from a hosted URL on the internet in order for it to download the file to the server as well as for players that connect too.

You can host your custom maps using various methods. The 2 most popular would be Dropbox and Discord (You will need to be a nitro booster of Discord since they have file upload limitations)

To get the URL from Dropbox, simply upload the map to your free Dropbox account. Once you have the URL, you MUST change the dl=0 at the end to dl=1 so this url is a force-download, otherwise your url will not work for Rust.

As mentioned, you can use Discord as well, but you must be a nitro boost subscriber to their service otherwise your upload file size limit will likely disallow you to host maps on Discord. For a quick rundown here's a short video showing how to do that!

#3 - Apply URL To Your Server's Startup Script

Similar to how you would host a procedural map, hosting a custom map is just a matter of adding a variable to your server's startup config script or just a matter of pasting the map's URL in a custom map field depending on if your host has that.

Here's an example of where this location is on our Tempest Panel

+server.levelurl [url]

Note: Custom map URLs within the startup parameters of your server WILL take priority over procedural maps, so you do not have to remove your previous procedural map variables.

Bonus - Common Issues

A great resource to view an up-to-date list of common issues when hosting a custom Rust map will be the Facepunch Wiki! We highly advise checking this out if you're experiencing any issues while trying to host a custom map within Rust!

Within this comprehensive article, we'll quickly go over what a DDoS attack is, what it stands for and how you can even reduce, or prevent them from affecting yourself!

I'm sure at some point you've likely experienced a very slow period while using some of your favorite platforms such as Netflix, Facebook, Youtube, or other misc websites. If you're an avid internet browser, like us, then there's a high chance you've likely visited a website that may have been actively affected by a DDoS attack which is always a frustrating experience.

What Does DDoS mean?

DDoS or (Distributed Denial-of-Service) attack is an illegal internet crime committed by individuals to flood the network of their desired target so much that their network becomes extremely slow, or in some cases taken entirely offline until investigated and mitigated (resolved).

Imagine checking your phone as you likely do every day for generic text messages from friends or family who you communicate with. Now imagine if thousand, or hundreds of thousands of text messages by different numbers started flooding in to your phone all at once. This would be comparable to a DDoS attack as it hinders your ability to not only use your phone more than likely but is also problematic to stop occurring.

A DDoS attack is when a user abundantly floods a network with an incredible amount of traffic, bad traffic that is.

Why would someone want to DDoS a network?

There can be many reasons or motives for an individual to intentionally DDoS a network, some of which could include a competition to slow competitors' progress or cause internal issues.

Another reason could be for monetary gain. In some situations, such cybercriminals may hold a network 'hostage' during an attack while, in return, requesting money compensation for them to release their attack on their victim.

How does a DDoS attack work?

In most cases, a DDoS attack takes place at the usage of what's referred to as a Botnet, which is a collection of machines and networks that were likely infected with ransomware and taken over by cybercriminals to then use as further leverage with larger-scale DDoS attacks. In some cases, these botnets can easily have hundreds or thousands, and even in rarer cases millions of infected computers to then use as a worker to accomplish their DDoS attacks.

Can you prevent a DDoS attack?

There are several things you can do to reduce your odds of becoming attacked, however, it's nearly impossible to assure you are 100% invulnerable to an attack, especially depending on your network service provider. So let's go over a few steps you can do to vastly reduce or possibly eliminate the odds of your network being affected by such attacks.

Be Non-Confrontational as possible

As mentioned one tactic of attacks can be solely based on a negative experience or a hostage situation with your network. It may make a minimal difference, but being a pleasant face within your community or business may help reduce your odds of becoming a victim, at least as often.

Invest in your network protection

Investing within your own network will go the largest route to mitigate and stop these attacks from ever making a difference depending on their scale. If you're experiencing these attacks we recommend you use a stable network such as Path.net which is the network we use and trust for all of our Tempest customer's machines to ensure they'll have the best possible outcome in the case their IP is the one chosen to be attacked. If you're considering improving your network or wanting to upgrade your server hosting provider check out our machine availability here!

Below is an example of a mitigated 1.5Tbit DDoS attack on the Path.net network!

Today we'll go over some key tips to consider regarding growing your gaming community server so it has the best potential at success as possible! This article specifically features Rust, however can benefit into any game you plan to host a server within.

Community Involvement

This one will likely be easy for your if you're already heavily involved within your community, but being very active and having an active team to help you will go a long way with your communities success! The faster that your community members see you respond, especially positively, the higher chance you'll have at them sticking around! Additional hosting giveaways, events and more usually helps drive community traffic in a good way!

Stand out!

Chances are if you're reading this article you're trying to get players to join and stick around on your server. There's no one-single answer or solution asides from the grind and hustle that follows when running servers. However, standing out and being different in a good way will likely help your chances of organically getting attention without much outreach as players will tell their friends about your unique features that nobody else has.

Cater to an Audience

This statement is very vague but for good reason. When you're wanting to run a server you'll likely gravitate towards installing dozens of fun mods and turning the game into something it's not. Be mindful of doing this because the more modded you turn your player's experience into the more of a niche you begin catering to and will limit your potential. It's always a safe bet to pay attention to what players desires are in large quantities and catering to that.

Server Reliability

Starting off hosting a server can quickly become a money pit at which may not result in returns. Nobody is promised they'll be able to retire hosting game servers. But what is a certainty is you will be heavily impacted if you're server has issues. These issues can range from lag spikes across all players, up to entire machine crashes which requires restarts or even getting ddos'd and taken offline for durations.

Be sure to have the best server provider available which to no surprise is Tempest Hosting. We offer many different plans regarding affordable hosting, all the way up to enterprise level machines for when you're ready to take the next step!

For a first step we recommend you check out our game servers to get your first experience on the best network possible with us and of course you can eventually upgrade to a dedicated machine whenever you outgrow the hardware of a game server!

Take Risks

To elaborate, we mean try new things. Explore with learning how to develop with custom mods. Learning programming languages is an invaluable asset to acquire when it comes to managing anything online in today's world and will give you a leg up on competition the more knowledge and skills you have to evolve your community on your own!

In addition to learning a skill, you can also take risks elsewhere such as trying new features to see what works and what doesn't. Trial and error will be your best friend and enemy in one.

Conclusion

We hope to see you succeed with whatever game you plan to begin venturing in and we hope that some of these tips have given you some insight on possibly running your organization a little more strategically to increase success! We would love to be a part of your success story and allowing us to host your game server! View more info at our website below!

In this article we'll look over what Battlemetrics is and why it's vastly useful for anyone that is interested in taking their game server to the next step, or perhaps gain a bit more knowledge if they already use Battlemetrics.

What is Battlemetrics.com?

Battlemetrics is essentially the swiss army knife of game server control and moderation. This third-party platform allows game server owners of multiple games such as Rust, DayZ, 7 Days to Die, Squad, and many more to easily monitor their server's player traffic, create schedules and triggers based on certain conditions, and even have full control regarding moderating your players for banning, muting, kicking and much more!

What makes this useful?

As mentioned above Battlemetrics can be used for many aspects. A few examples would be player moderation for your server regarding viewing all the info you need in one place, server statistics on traffic, automation tools like schedules and triggers and much more! My personal favorite would be the triggers at which you have control to create for your own automation or moderation purposes based on conditions typically.

What is a trigger you may ask?

Triggers are conditional actions base on nearly infinite possibilities. For instance, if you wanted to be alerted when a player has a keyword within their name. Or if your server FPS drops below X amount to alert you via Discord webhook, etc. The sky is the limit regarding what triggers you're able to make. Luckily Battlemetrics has even supplied an example trigger page you can get more ideas from or use!

What else can this service do?

In addition to many automation aspects Battlemetrics can be used for monitoring your server rank, player traffic, player chat, and much more which are vital for staying on top of the success for your community you are trying to grow! It's no surprise we love the service so much that Tempest.net is a proud sponsor of Battlemetrics.com!

Another very powerful resource/option within Battlemetrics is the ability to share organization ban lists. This is extremely useful for in the case you have a ban list dedicated for cheaters, you can share this with another community at which can also return the favor from cheaters they've found so you have a larger collection of a ban list at which you both benefit from by disallowing those players from connecting!

Does this service cost?

Yes and no, Battlemetrics can be used for free and has been by thousands of players and servers, however, you will lack many features that are essential such as a few mentioned above, like access to triggers, and other server control aspects to moderate your community with ease. You can view the cost of each package as well as the benefits below which is very affordable for the benefits you get!

Community Made Triggers

I've started my own personal collection of handy triggers over the last few months that I've made and since then even a few others have contributed as well. Feel free to give the pack a look at more possibilities you can do with the use of Battlemetrics.

Today we explore how we have engineered our new Intel i7-12700K machines (in testing) to offer performance enhanced machines that are simply ahead of the market curve.

What's the point, surely the 11th gens were fast enough?

Well normally I'd agree with you, but Tempest happens to harbour game(s) that get really core hungry.

RUST, yeah that game with the rock and the naked people running around? Well RustDedicated is largely bound to one or two cores, making single-thread performance the main metric in measuring a server(s) ability to hold larger user populations within the game. You have a low clock speed? - you're going to struggle to hold larger player counts, you have a high clock speed your player counts could theoretically hit the 6/700+ range if you play your cards right.

Other games could also see increase as well, the chip offers a CPU Benchmark of 33,926 (4,039 single-threaded) as well as 12 cores, 20 threads. Intel® architecture also splits those 12 cores up into 8 performance-cores (p-cores) and 4 high efficiency cores.

Oh and one other thing, this CPU (and our board) supports utilisation of up to 128GB of DDR5 Memory, but there will be another post detailing our results on that.

What's the performance increase?

We ran this in our Phoenix location on a test bench for a few days, allowing some of our customers to give the machine a spin and see what damage (aka results) they could pull from it.

These results are just initial tests running under ideal conditions.

Our configuration: CPU: Intel® i7-12700K, RAM: 64GB DDR5 Memory (5600Mhz), Storage: 2x 1TB NVMe Samsung 980 Evo Pros

All of this still maintaining our high capacity 10Gbps server-ports behind our 10Tbit/s+ network with our stateful filtering.

Due to the nature of the customers we expect to be interested in these machines, all tests were performed in a way where the results are comparative to some of our other Intel® builds popular with our Rust community.

Okay, okay... you want to see the results.

Benchmarking Results

• We saw (on average) a 40% increase over the Intel 11th Generation builds
• Raw calculation %'s were in the range of 172% when compared to a 3600X* (up from 140% for 11th-gen and 109% for 10th-gen)
• 81 degrees 40-50% CPU utilisation with one p-cores pinned to max.

*Raw calculations are based on calculating large quantities of prime factors in the Unity engine.

*Keep in mind we are still revising these builds, working on improving their cooling and airflow as well as looking at using 12-900K chips.

If you're interested in getting your hands on one of these then you can place a preorder on https://tempest.net or speak to our team about a machine that fits your needs!

This post is going to explore how Tempest (and Path Network, Inc) uses the Principles of Least Privilege to both secure its hardware, but also our network traffic.

What are the "Principles of Least Privilege"?

Cyber Security 101 dictates that "thou who not need access, should not have access".

I.e. rather than assuming everyone (even if that is a person(s) physical access to bare metal resources, or public network access) has positive intentions, assume they don't - Only provide the absolute bare minimum privileges that are needed to complete the task. In the event of abuse or compromise impact on data is significantly smaller and also easier to contain and control.

You see "GDPR" (General Data Protection Regulation) being thrown around as a developer buzz-word, this essentially mandates basic principles of least privilege on a legal baseline.

Its not just a few companies doing this either, in the past few years we have seen significant restrictions placed on data extrusion points on websites, a big example of this is the change Google made to YouTube regarding the subscriber count API back in late 2019.

Yeah, but what do you have to do with this?

Okay, okay... I hear you. You're bored of me nattering on about API's and YouTube so let's get to the interesting networking bit!

Port Punching is a technology used within our network which forces this "principle of least privilege" concept. Our network design allows us to filter each individual packet that enters our network (through any of our 18+ PoPs) and if it doesn't match a specific rule set laid out in our clients firewall rules (or filtering rules) then it's dropped on the edge.

This means when you get a brand new machine from Tempest, you wont be able to connect to it at all until you specifically allow it.

This comes with massive benefits, it is a super simple way to enforce network security for all of our customers.

Depending on the operating system(s) you run you could have exposed ports that you're not even aware of. And in worse case scenarios in the case where your machine may be compromised, by limiting network connectivity on the edge you make it particularly difficult for Client -> Server backdoor exploits to be as effective. Both of these are vectors of attack that you simply don't have on our network.

If you block all incoming traffic, do I need to make rules to surf the web?

You see, this is where it gets really clever! Ever wondered why it's called Port Punching? Well its fairly self-explanatory...

Our firewall allows incoming connections conditional of an outgoing request being made first.

This technology is built into our network stack to provide a seamless and secure experience for all of our customers.

This year has already pulled all of the surprises out of the box, or so that's what we thought. Today we are going to explore how Tempest managed to take on not one but two 1.6+Tbit per second DDoS attack directed towards a Rust server.

The best bit? Our client didn't even notice!

What even happened?

On 03/14/2022 at approximately 03:19am UTC our infrastructure detected an attack against one of our clients that quickly scaled to well over 1.5Tbit/s - During this time our on-call engineers monitored the network to learn and document where the attack may of originated and who it's intended target was.

Luckily for their target they were running on a bare metal solution with Tempest. We leverage our parent company Path Network, Inc to provide all of our clients with a premium 10Gbps network port on a network that has the capacity to mitigate attacks in the range of 10+Tbit/second (for reference, that's an attack with a volume 10x the size of this one).

Our mitigation

Our network was able to quickly identify the attack and deal with it using our stateful mitigation technology. This meant this attack was balanced and successfully mitigated on our edge servers across the world.

The attack was comprised of 99% UDP traffic and was dealt with using our Layer 7 Application filters. Our network put each packet through a strict verification process to ensure it was legitimate traffic before it even reached the bare metal port of our client.

The results were, well outstanding. We were able to fully mitigate these attacks without any downtime to any of our clients. This outcome is only achievable by both our bleeding edge layer 7 mitigation technologies but also our ability to eat through layer 4 floods.

How is this useful to me?

This year has been a wildcard so far, but one thing is for certain - the threat imposed by denial of service (DDoS) attacks is only growing. As the internet of things continues to expand across the globe the size and sophistication of these attacks are following suit.

Tempest Hosting is dedicated to providing bare metal hosting solutions, offering an ever-growing library of Layer 7 application filters - this means you don't have to just be a Rust host to benefit from our products, in-fact you don't even have to be in the game industry. This vast selection of filters is what keeps us online during these attacks and we can do the same for you.

• Learn more about the Path Network XDP/eBPF filtering here:
• https://blog.path.net/application-filters/
• Learn more about our "stateful mitigation" technologies: https://blog.path.net/stateful-mitigation/

Tempest has been working hard to build out a wide array of tools and deployment options to help our customers have the ability to deploy their infrastructure and scale up at record speeds. One of the main features driving this focus is our DCI Manager auto-deployment scripts.

Our Implementation

These scripts allow us to define and fine tune specific deployment options that are executed after a base operating system is installed.

We are currently working to expand our selection for automatic deployments, right now we have released options for Minecraft (Java) as well as Pterodactyl (including Wings) and Teamspeak 3 on the way soon! These options are ideal if you are using Tempest bare metal as a game hosting platform, allowing you to easily deploy and collate additional nodes into your panel/infrastructure with ease.

On the surface if you are running a "static" workflow, this may not seem particularly useful at first glance, however auto-deployment gives our clients the ability to quickly and programmatically configure their machine(s) and software exactly as they want. This makes mass deployments (for example 10-15 pterodactyl nodes) take 1/10th of the time that it would otherwise.

Why is auto deployment important to others?

It's important that we offer solutions that can scale with you (our customers). Deployment automation is an integral part of this scalability assisting us on both the bare metal deployment lead times as well as the continuous support aspect of our services.

We tailor each of our deployment scripts to run in a way that is tried and tested (and best for performance on our hardware). This creates a "standard" which can make diagnosing and identifying issues with our team significantly easier.

As software gets more advanced its crucial we offer these deployment methods, down the line this opens the door to being able to create and run specific development (or production) environments the moment your services are deployed, giving you more time to focus on the product you want to sell - not how it's setup.

How does it work (the technical side of things).

First of all we set up a preboot execution environment with the desired operating system you select. This is commonly referred to as PXE Booting (pronounced pixie). This is by far the most efficient method of installation as the image is mounted via our network and loaded. This helps us avoid the slow booting times of ISO images/CDROM limitations with larger operating systems like Windows Server 2019.

Once your installation is complete we then mount and execute one of our custom scripts. These are programmatically maintained to ensure we are always pulling the latest stable version of whatever software you desire!

And well that's it! Just like magic both your server and software are up and running on your new bare metal with little to no interaction from humans.