On Saturday, February 26 we performed the scheduled February maintenance on our Mustangserver REST API which included the following:

• We moved the VM to a physically different (newer, bigger) server in a different data centre of the same provider, of course remaining in Germany. You should not even notice the change, although you may notice api.usegroup.de and gw.usegroup.de resolve to a new IP address.
• There is now a manual for Mustangserver 0.8.0, adding the brief description how to write Order-X files

We now use the host system firewall, which should give us more security

additionally, in the past weeks

• we renewed our SSL server certificate
• Quba’s validation feature was unfixed from 0.7.0 and now always uses the most up to date version
• we shut down Mustangserver versions prior to 0.8.0
• we performed a usability test on the Mustangproject homepage, had the obligatory data protection awareness training for our employees and we
• further improved monitoring: apart from monitoring our infrastructure (i.e. network, system, and the API server) we now also monitor the Mustangserver process

We will most likely do some un-down-timish updates in the meantime, e.g. Mustangserver 0.8.1 will be released in the near future and support to convert from plain PDF to PDF/A-3. It will be an additional parameter which will be backward compatible. PDF/A-3 files can be surprisingly smaller than PDF/A-1 ones.

If all goes well there will be no scheduled maintenance neccessary for March or April. Unless otherwise communicated the next scheduled maintenance with a small downtime will take place on Saturday, May 6th, 2023, again from 15:00-16:00 CET. The reason is yet another SSL certificate update which requires us to restart the API management process.