Chuck_TX wrote:
It appears it is a DNS issue.
It might appear to be, but it is not... The simplest reason for this not to be a DNS issue is the following: it's a GLOBAL issue; people all around the world are experiencing it, and for some reason it started around today (with a maximum regression of two days back in time).
If you just think about the fact that it's a global issue, then how can it be a DNS issue? After all, not all ISPs are using the same DNS servers. And even if the route to the Apple server(s) in question may be the same for the most part, it'll likely differ up till the point when it reaches Apple's very own ISP (i.e. the provider that gets an Internet connection up to Apple's DC).
Those who are and/or were successful after changing their DNS settings so as to use GoogleDNS are in luck. But it merely does one thing: it takes the national part of the DNS translation out of the route. So, instead of having to travel along countless (in my case) Dutch hops, it'll take these out, and go straight up to the AIX (where there's a Dutch mirror for most of the Google Servers). In case there may be no mirror for the GoogleDNS servers within Dutch territory, it may even be so that I'd be taken all the way to the American border, dependent upon which server takes my request...
All I want to say by this illustration is, that there is NO WAY in the world that this can be a DNS issue. As a matter of fact, it'll not even have a single thing to do with ANY service provided by your own ISP, because of the very same reason I mentioned earlier on. The issue is GLOBAL, so there's no involvement for LOCAL ISPs...
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As for an issue related to one's own system configuration, that'd be far-fetched too. Simply because, in my case as well as in that of many others here, the service was fully operational up till a few days ago. 10.8.1 was released a few weeks back, and I received a printer software update afterwards. so it worked. And even though one may not have received this update, the service will have checked for updates properly.
I myself have mentioned an explanation for this error code meaning 'The Requested File Does Not Exist' in a couple of threads, but this might be the case for a file the system looks for on the remote host (i.e. Apple's Server(s). In that case, it would proove to be a server side issue, in which case we'd simply have to wait. And, as that is what most of Apple's technicians seem to have advised, that shall be just what I'll do. It won't bother me as much that I won't be able to install updates for a couple of days... Just as long as that's the time this outage will take...