You've probably noticed that recently we're going down for extensive periods of time. Tonight, we had another lot of downtime again. The way our infrastructure is set up, we have what's called our front end and our back end. Our front end is the servers, and the proxy that you connect to to login. The back end, is the technical stuff such as our databases and internal stuff. This is what's being hit. We currently run our databases on a separate machine to our front end servers which is on a different host. Unfortunately, that host is being hit with the new NPT flood attacks. Essentially, it is able to amplify small attacks into much bigger attacks which is bringing down any server that is in that datacentre. Right now, there is nothing much we can do but wait it out. When the back end servers go down, we lose the proxy as that relies a lot of its connections on that database, so anybody not already logged in cannot log in. This also means that the ban system goes down too, and anything else using those databases. Sometimes, this can result in you or others being disconnected randomly or the server just crashing. To stop it, we're going to be moving our back end databases to a new server so we do not experience this downtime again. I will post an update on this situation as it progresses.
Why is it when I log on, this never happens to me. I feel like such good luck even though I almost broke my arm today.
