We're getting scattered reports of site unavailability from the East Coast of the US, but don't see any issues at our end.  The servers are up and feeding data to chumbys.

It sounds like there may be a backbone or peering problem somewhere on the Internet.

no, the control panel is downloaded from a *.chumby.com server, no peer network involved.  the SaaS Ops team has not
received any alerts and our servers have all been functional, so this smells like a strange DNS problem, potentially isolated
to the East Coast.

if it happens again, can you do the following from either a windows or unix machine?

nslookup xml.chumby.com

which should return:

Name:   xml.chumby.com
Address: 69.43.206.68

we will also continue to investigate on this end

/mdkail

BTW: DNS returns back as stated above (I am in Boston, MA).

Thanks, Scott - a couple of other folks are reporting the issue.  As before, the servers are completely operational, and this appears to be a pure DNS issue.

Working now ... I did cycle my airport extreme and wifi AP just moments ago (as per Sam's suggestion).

Just to add my experience, Chumby was out yesterday afternoon GMT over here in the UK. Came back up just before midnight BST.

The forums were also not accessible.

Today I am being asked to activate my chumby, but cannot

Just had the control panel issue again. Attempting to cycle again. 3:42 PM (EST).

no one else has reported a problem since i fixed the issue around 0900PDT today.

i know that you have power-cycled your AP, but have you done the same with your cable/dsl modem?  something has
the bogus info cached.  and, make sure you power-cycle the chumby as well, since the flashplayer tends to be
hyper-aggressive about caching DNS.

/mdkail

Cycling your cable/DSL/Fiber router, your wifi, and chumby seems to do the trick (for a while) ...

I am now having connection problems to the Chumby network, from BOTH of my Chumbys (Chumbies?  Please don’t ask why I have two!).

Originally, they were not changing widgets, and when I rebooted, both returned the error reported above:

Unable to download the Chumby Control Panel ... Please restart your chumby to try again. If the problem persists, please contact custom support by emailing: support@chumby.com

I’ve reset my router and cable modem, and initially one Chumby booted, and the other seemed like it was going to reboot, but wanted me to manually reset the time, defaulting to December 31st, 1969 (epoch zero).  After a few more reboots, including one time when it claimed it was no longer registered, it eventually booted correctly and I had my widgets back.

Both worked for a few (3+) hours, and both are now not working again.  I rebooted one, and am getting the error message reported above.  I did not reboot the other -- which I use as a clock -- and it is faithfully displaying the built-in Chumby clock, but I have none of my widgets.  I can make a WiFi network connection from the Control Panel to my router, and can successfully get a DHCP address, but I cannot get connected to the Chumby network (Control Panel claims that my Chumby is not registered).

Also, other WiFi Internet access is working fine for me – same WiFi router and same cable modem -- for other devices, including a VoIP phone and an Apple TV.  So I don’t think this is a problem with my local network.

I am on the East coast (New York), but the last posting from support said the problem was resolved the morning of May 2nd.  This is to confirm that I am seeing this problem on Sunday, May 4th.  I did not have any problems prior to today (both Chumbys were working as of late last night).

Thanks for the link!  Good to confirm it's not just me ... and this gives me some good troubleshooting tips for the future as well.

Actually, when I came home tonight both Chumbies had "magically" fixed themselves ... so hopefully that means that either the DNS problem has finally been resolved, or the DNS cache has finally expired.

Otherwise, if the problem comes back, at least now I have a fix by hard-coding the IP in the local hosts file.

Thanks again for the pointer!