Question: I have been using an Arduino Uno to connect to IoT Foundation on Bluemix. I've used both the Quickstart and the Registered devices. So far I've found that connecting to either service is intermittent. Currently I cannot connect my device (using IBM internal IP) to the quickstart. 

I've set this up and tested in the past but lately it doesn't work (from 2 IBM sites). I'm using the recipe verbatim except for the device ID/MAC address.

Pinging quickstart.messaging.internetofthings.ibmcloud.com returns a timeout.

Answer: 
Quickstart will not respond to ping, which is why you get a timeout when pinging that hostname.

Using mosquitto (<http://mosquitto.org/>) I use the following as a simple test when debugging issues like this -- are you sure your arduino isn't having networking issues as all seems fine when I connect? 

Make a subscription:

```
mosquitto_sub -h quickstart.messaging.internetofthings.ibmcloud.com -p 1883 -i a:quickstart:flobble_app -t iot-2/type/+/id/flobble/evt/+/fmt/+

```

Send an event: 

```
mosquitto_pub -h quickstart.messaging.internetofthings.ibmcloud.com -p 1883 -i d:quickstart:flibble:flobble -t iot-2/evt/status/fmt/json -m "{\"d\": {\"hi\": 100, \"name\":\"flibble\", \"foo\": 80}}"

```
We have also had issues with connections and outages when working with Bluemix. Another issue we faced was with the length of messages in the suggested [MQTT library](https://github.com/256dpi/arduino-mqtt/pull/5).

We ended up using ATSD instead of Bluemix for our IOT use cases with Arduino Uno devices and DHT sensors. [Here](https://github.com/axibase/arduino/tree/master/dataTransmission) you can find an in-depth guide on setting up a temperature/humidity sensor paired with an Arduino device. Using the guide you will be able to stream the sensor data into ATSD using MQTT or TCP protocol. Open-source sketches are included.