vBulletin database errors caused by foreign IP addresses

[jdelasko]

INSERT IGNORE INTO vbsession
(sessionhash, userid, host, idhash, lastactivity, location, styleid, languageid, loggedin, inforum, inthread, incalendar, badlocation, useragent, bypass, profileupdate)
VALUES
('97b54255fd2b947dea29d05615a3e756', 0, '189.19.74.214', '517585b3b2f212d51c31145e433b3e4e', 1218118635, '/forums/index.php', 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 'Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Update a; AOL 6.0; Windows 98)', 0, 0);

MySQL Error : MySQL server has gone away
Error Number : 2006
Date : Thursday, August 7th 2008 @ 09:17:50 AM
Script : http://www.majorleaguetalk.com/forums/index.php
Referrer : http://www.majorleaguetalk.com/forums/index.php
IP Address : 189.19.74.214
Username : Unregistered
Classname : vB_Database

I've been geting a lot of alerts similar to the one above lately. The IP addresses listed are from places like China, Korea, Russia, etc. I have never received an alert like this with an IP address that belongs to a registered user.

Can anyone tell me if this error may be due to some sort of hacking attempt? I'm getting several of these every day and it's getting a little annoying. My vB version is 3.6.4

I've been begging my hosting company to install GeoIP so I can easily block the entire other side of the planet, but that hasn't happened yet.

I don't know enough about mySQL to decipher the above error alert. Can somebody please explain to me why this may be occurring?

[Opserty]

<a href="http://www.vbulletin.com/docs/html/troubleshoot_mysql_goneaway" target="_blank">Lost connection to MySQL server during query</a>

[jdelasko]

Originally Posted by Opserty

Lost connection to MySQL server during query

I gathered that much. I was hoping someone could explain this in greater detail....like what was this user in Uruguay trying to do when this error occurred

[Lynne]

Originally Posted by jdelasko

I gathered that much. I was hoping someone could explain this in greater detail....like what was this user in Uruguay trying to do when this error occurred

It shows he was just viewing the index.php page as an unregistered user. Kinda weird that you are only getting these errors from foreign unregistered users.

[jdelasko]

Originally Posted by Lynne

It shows he was just viewing the index.php page as an unregistered user. Kinda weird that you are only getting these errors from foreign unregistered users.

I find it pretty hard to believe that a simple page view can generate an sql error. I had a bunch of these from a chinese IP a few days ago.

[davide101]

Every pageview, whether logged in or not, queries the database. That's how it gets information to display the page. I get these messages periodically when the server is queried and times out. Out of a million visitors a year, it will happen about a dozen times.