Chumby as a Great Firewall monitor

One idea for Chumby is as a monitor to test reachability of sites. While most of the Internet is fully accessible in China, there are some sites that often blocked or float between being blocked and unblocked. By having a Chumby widget that periodically checks reachability of certain web sites, it can display at a glance the "weather report" of a list of sites.

Example sites

For example, these sites are well known to periodically change between reachable and not reachable, depending on the whims of the Internet authorities, the political climate, etc.

• Youtube
• Flickr
• Wikipedia
• Blogspot/Blogger

Mostly blocked:

• Wordpress
• Typepad
• Chinese Wikipedia (zh.wikipedia.org)

Tools needed

Tools usually used from command line for testing reachability:

• DNS lookup
• Traceroute and ping
• Wget, curl or just telnet

Possible display

Display info

• The external IP of the Chumby
• Basic info on Internet connection of said Chumby (province, town, ISP)
• Up to six sites on the main display, including history of reachability