Topic: Having trouble with chumby.com?

Since Friday, May 2, some of you may have been experiencing issue with resolving the chumby.com domains, which may manifest as chumbys not able to download the Control Panel, "server not found" when attempting to load various chumby-related web sites, etc.

The issue is a bug at the third-party provider that has been the authoritative source for our domain record.  One of several nameservers is publishing an incorrect DNS record for the chumby.com domains.  We have been unable to get the provider to fix the problem, so we've taken over the record ourselves, however, the old records are still being cached across the network.

For those of you unfamiliar with how DNS works, think of it like a giant phone book, actually, a bunch of phone books scattered across several providers.  Each our servers has an IP address - for instance, 69.43.206.68 for our main website, or 69.43.206.73 for this forum.  Those numbers are hard to remember, so we purchased the domain name "chumby.com" to make it easier for you to find our servers - when you enter "www.chumby.com", the name is looked up in the "phone book" and your computer is sent to 69.43.206.68 to get the data.

We relied on a third-party company to be the authoritative source for our "phone number" - whenever your ISP wants to know what the number is for chumby.com, it would go to this authoritative source to get that number, and then pass it back to your computer.   In order to speed things up in the future, your ISP might temporarily keep a copy of this number in case you or others ask for it again.  The provider has several phone books, which are supposed to be identical, however, *one* of the phone books had an incorrect entry, so you'd sometimes get the wrong number.

Over the weekend, we were unable to get this provider to fix that particular entry, so we created our own server and made it the authoritative source for our domains - we're effectively publishing our own phone book now.  However, it will take a while for every ISP and system out on the Internet to switch over to our phone book instead of using the old bad ones. In some cases, your ISP may still be holding on to the old number, or your cable/DSL modem, or even your computer and browsers.

Eventually, everyone will recognize our systems as the authoritative source as the old entries expire - you can probably speed up that process by restarting your local modem.

We're sorry about the problem, and wish there was something we could have done to avoid the problem or speed up the recovery, however, the most frustrating thing about this issue has been that it's been entirely out of our control.