Remote access, Patch management and securing your server.

[birdman3131]

Got a couple different but intertwined topics today. Most are windows only.

Remote access to your machine.

I do not recommend opening windows RDP to the world. It is not generally considered the most secure.
If you only have one person that needs access I recommend Google's remote desktop. It is easy to setup, requires no open ports and has great mobile support as well.

If you need multiple admin's to have access I recommend Action1's free edition . It has several benefits. The downside is essentially no mobile access..

1. Free so long as you stay below 100 computers. If you have that many machines you may need help.
2. Lets you give different people access to different machines. You may only want your rust admins having access to your rust machines.
3. Easy to revoke access to admins if they leave the organization. (Be warned that having given them access in the past leaves room for them adding alternate access methods.)

And last but not least it gives

Patch Management.

Action1 lets update windows (And some other apps) on your schedule. So you can tell your community that at X time once a month the servers are going down for windows updates. Set a GSA task to shut all the servers down before action1 does all the windows updates and then in a couple hours restart the servers. (No clue how long windows updates will take to accomplish.)

And finally

Overall securing your machine.

A couple things I prefer to do.

Change the administrator password to a long complicated one. GSA requires it to be 30 chars or less in length for setup but once setup is finished GSA switches to key based auth and your password can be longer.

Only allow access to ports 21(FTP), 22(SSH) and 8384(Syncthing Web Interface) to the ip addresses here if your firewall supports it. Preferably just add platform.gameserverapp.com as it gets updated if GSA ever needs to add a new server.

If you have any questions feel free to ping me on the discord. Birdman3131