Introduction

You may have experienced issues recently with Boardies MySQL Manager for Android returning an unexpected error message (screenshot below) when trying to connect to a DB or performing a query between the 27th-31st December 2015.

This document outlines some of the issues that were the cause of this outage and a new service that we have released to keep you updated about any outages with this API or any other apps or services that we have made available.

What Happened?

Now, you probably noticed, that on the 29th December we released a pretty big update which included SSH tunnelling support. First of all, the update had nothing to do with the outages, this was just unfortunate timing.

The issue was actually related to our VPS servers hosting company experiencing a large substantial long term DDoS/DoS attack attacking their various data centres around the world.

Our hosting provider have been very good at keeping us informed regarding this issue and we have been with them for around 2 or 3 years and this is the first time that we have had any connectivity issues to our server. We have no information as to who are performing the attacks and what their reasons are.

What are Boardies IT Solutions Doing to Prevent This

Unfortunately these types of attacks are difficult to prevent. The attackers were buying large quantities of Botnets to set up a large distribute denial of service across the providers various data centres around the world. Unfortunately currently, we don't have the resources to install more servers in other countries to prevent these sorts of issues as Boardies IT Solutions is an individual developer. At some point, howevever, we would love to be able to grow and install more servers, so any donations, for example purchasing an in app-purchase within our apps, even if you don't need the extra functionality will help.

However, that being said, we do have some things in place, that if our server does go offline, or start responding slowly we have various monitoring systems in place.

First of all, a few days ago, we released a new status page. This has been something we've wanted to do for some time, but due to the recent issues, we prioritised this to get this done soon. Therefore, you can now go to http://status.boardiesitsolutions.com to view the status of the API as shown in the screenshot below.

When you visit the site, you can view all of the services/APIs that we have and what they're current state is. When we have a service outage, or we are undergoing maintenance, you will be able to see the incident reports and what state each component of the service is currently in.

We have monitoring agents on the server that alert us very quickly to any issues that the server is experiencing, whether its unresponsive or responding slower than expected.

In the event that our site does go down completely (this didn't happen for long periods of time when we had issues) we will keep our twitter account http://www.twitter.com/BoardITSolution updated with the status.

We hope that this clears up some of the issues that you may have had but please do not hesitage to contact us at [email protected].

Again we apologise for any inconveniance that these outages may have caused.