I use a VPN tunnel to administer my VPS and to connect back to my home network when I am away. Over the past year I have used both OpenVPN and WireGuard for this purpose. Here is how they compare in practice. The setup My use case is straightforward: I need a secure tunnel from my laptop to my VPS for SSH, web dashboards, and occasionally reaching services on my home LAN. Nothing exotic — just point-to-point connectivity between machines I control. ...
Running a speed test from your own machine tells you about one path. To get a broader picture of your server’s connectivity, you need to test from multiple locations. Here are the approaches I use. ping.pe ping.pe is one of the simplest tools for this. Enter your server’s IP or hostname and it runs ping, MTR, and port checks from dozens of locations simultaneously. The results show up in a live grid. ...
I spent the last few weeks reading about BGP after running into a routing issue that I could not explain with traceroute alone. These are rough notes, not a tutorial. The basics BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) is how autonomous systems on the internet exchange routing information. An autonomous system (AS) is a network or group of networks operated by a single organization, identified by an AS number (ASN). For example, Cloudflare is AS13335, Hetzner is AS24940. ...
When something is slow or unreachable on the network, the first instinct is to blame the server. But the problem is often somewhere in between. These are the tools I reach for when I need to figure out where packets are getting lost or delayed. Traceroute basics Traceroute shows the path packets take from your machine to a destination. It works by sending packets with increasing TTL (Time to Live) values. Each router along the path decrements the TTL by one, and when it reaches zero, that router sends back an ICMP Time Exceeded message. This reveals each hop. ...
I recently moved a domain to a new server and had to wait for the change to take effect everywhere. The process is commonly called “DNS propagation,” but that term is a bit misleading. Here is what actually happens. DNS is not a broadcast system When people say “DNS is propagating,” it sounds like your new record is being pushed out to servers around the world. That is not how it works. ...