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    Outage Incident Report Nov 6, 2023


    outage incident
    Summary November 6, 2023 1.30 AM UTC - Major outage detected. All regions are affected. 2.30 AM UTC - Issue with DNS detected. The domain pinggy.online went to “serverHold”. No prior notice or response from the domain registrar. 5.30 AM UTC - Transferred domain from Porkbun to AWS Route53. 6.30 AM UTC - “serverHold” status persisted on AWS. Support tickets opened. 12.10 PM UTC - New domain “pinggy.link” configured. Tunnels accessible.

    Scaling across Multiple Regions


    engineering update
    A user from South Korea brought to our attention that Pinggy works great for them, but it is slow. The answer to “why” was obvious to us. Pinggy was hosting its servers in the USA, specifically in Ohio. One key goal of Pinggy is to provide not only tunnels but fast and reliable tunnels. To improve the situation, we decided to host the tunnels in the region nearest to where the user is creating the tunnel from (as the default behavior).

    TLS Tunnel


    guide tls
    A TLS tunnel, often referred to as an SSL tunnel, establishes a secure channel that enables encrypted data transmission between two endpoints. This safeguards the information from eavesdropping and tampering, as it relies on the TLS protocol to create an encrypted connection between a client and a server. TLS tunneling ensures end-to-end encryption, a crucial element in preserving the confidentiality and integrity of data transmitted over the internet. This security feature shields sensitive information from prying eyes and malicious eavesdroppers, including internet service providers.

    Ngrok - But without downloading anything


    Paste this command to get a tunnel to localhost, port 8000: ssh -p 443 -R0:localhost:8000 qr@a.pinggy.io Your browser does not support HTML video. Ngrok is an excellent tool loved by developers worldwide. If you need to expose your localhost server, Ngrok comes in handy. However, utilizing Ngrok requires downloading a platform-specific program (binary) for your operating system, be it Mac, Windows, or Linux. Subsequently, you must make the binary executable and launch it from the terminal.

    Remote Desktop for Raspberry Pi and other IoT devices


    guide tcp
    You remotely access your Raspberry Pi desktop from anywhere using Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP). Even if your Pi is outside your local network, you can access it easily over the internet using Pinggy. Summary Step 1. Run these commands on your Raspberry Pi: sudo apt update sudo apt install xrdp sudo systemctl start xrdp Step 2. Run this command to get a public URL to your Raspberry Pi: ssh -p 443 -R0:localhost:3389 tcp@a.

    Access localhost from your phone!


    update guide
    Your browser does not support HTML video. Pinggy now supports QR codes within the terminal! Summary Start a Pinggy tunnel and press u or c to see QR code. Press Esc to hide QR code. Or use qr or aqr as username to always show QR in the terminal: ssh -p443 -R0:localhost:8000 qr@a.pinggy.io ssh -p443 -R0:localhost:8000 aqr@a.pinggy.io You can pass your token along with qr by appending them with the + symbol: ssh -p443 -R0:localhost:8000 token+qr@a.

    Updates to counter deceptive content distribution


    update
    On July 14, distribution of deceptive and social engineering content was detected through some Pinggy tunnels. Our logs show that it has been done using the free tier through random subdomains ending with a.pinggy.io. As a result, while accessing your own tunnels you might have noticed a “Deceptive Website Warning”. However, we assure you that if you were accessing your own tunnel / tunnel that you trust, then there was no possible threat.

    Fast DNS Records with AWS Route 53


    A user from South Korea brought to our notice that Pinggy works great for them, but it is slow. The answer to “why” was obvious to us. Pinggy hosts its servers in the USA, specifically in Ohio. One key goal of Pinggy is to not only provide tunnels, but fast and reliable tunnels. To improve the situation, we decided to host the tunnels in the nearest region from where the user is creating the tunnel (as the default behavior).