CentOS / RHEL Server Setup and Administration Essentials

Vulnerability management is the continuous process of finding weaknesses in systems, deciding which ones matter in context, fixing or mitigating them, and confirming the fix.

A penetration test is an authorised, scoped attempt by a skilled tester to exploit weaknesses in a system the way an attacker would, ending in a report the owner can act on.

Incident response is the prepared, practised process by which an organisation detects a security incident, contains it, removes the cause, recovers, and learns from what happened.

IP addressing is the scheme that gives every interface on a network a numeric address, with IPv4's four-byte addresses now supplemented by IPv6's much larger space, and with private ranges reserved for use inside networks that reach the internet through translation.

Subnetting divides an address block into smaller networks by choosing how many leading bits identify the network, written as a prefix length or a subnet mask, so that each subnet has its own range of host addresses and its own routing entry.

Routing is how packets move between networks: each router holds a table of known destinations and the next hop toward each, learned by configuration or by a protocol, and forwards each packet to the most specific match.

Load balancing is the practice of putting one entry point in front of several interchangeable servers and distributing incoming requests among them by a chosen policy, so that no single machine carries the traffic and no single machine's failure takes the service down.

A CDN is a worldwide network of servers that answers requests for your site from a location near the person asking, instead of sending every request back to the single machine your site runs on.

DNS is the distributed lookup system that turns a hostname such as getting-digital.net into the IP address a browser can connect to, by walking a chain of nameservers whose answers are then cached for a lifetime the domain's owner publishes.