[fChk]

A life lesson to learn: Never disconnect your old SSH session that is running on the previous port before you have the new SSH port working correctly 100%! You will regret it the moment you closed the old session and can no longer connect via the new and the old port. This will especially be frustrating in cases where you have no means of emergency access to the VPS.

I think this belongs into any guide about changing SSH configurations. You can apply this even when setting up things like public key authentication or doing other things. One wrong configuration line and you can lock yourself out, too.

Indeed!.. The golden rule is 'Never terminate "something" before the new "thing" kicks in!' It's valid in IT as well as in LIFE in general. This is what separates prudence from recklessness.

Ok!.. I'll profit from this post to expand a bit into the WHY of this tutorial. Actually I didn't plan it at all!

> First, I'm a minimalist that subscribes to the saying: 'If it ain't broke.. don't Fix it!' Thus, I generally don't block port 22. But the thing is that the hammering was so unusually intense on the poor Phoenix VPS-9 that I decided to do it this time. Yes, I did read @deanhills remarks on this in various threads but never imagined the intensity of it!

I'm not sure if this is because the scanners are focusing more on the IP ranges of the datacenters in the hope to sneak into the unsuspecting newbies' systems (and there are so many of them around...) Because scanning the Whole 4 Billion IPv4 addresses at that rate is just insane!!

I did check on the IPv6 VPSs, there is none of that!.. I guess the gazillion IPs aren't all that attractive nor practical :-)

> Second, When I started to skim through the various topics laying around this forum -when I first started to post in here, I did notice that a fair amount of them (even in the 'VPS Protection' forum) were disasters waiting to happen when blindly implemented. Hence the "Right-Way" mention in the title.

> Third, Because I'm usually working on an SELinux-enforced system, I wanted to include the step needed to deal with that issue which is easily forgotten.

> Fianlly, even-though the title mentions specifically CentOS 8, this guide is valid for every modern RedHat system (Fedora, CentOS and RHEL.) CentOS 8 is just the system that happens to be the one I'm working on in Phoenix VPS-9.