TiVo servers down?

[mrtickle]

Daily call failed today with "Failed. Call interrupted" onscreen.

Log says:
Otclient:09/06:08:53:39: /tvbin/TClient: Executing HTTP GET: /tvbin/http_get -U http://204.176.49.33:8080/dynamic/PC/B2/PC-B24-p13762-v528.slice.bnd -D /var/packages -T (ahem!) -C 1189068716 -d
Otclient:09/06:08:56:39: /tvbin/TClient: http GET command failed: connect failed, reason = Connection timed out

So it gives up after 3 minutes. I can't ping 204.176.49.33 - is it just me?

[CarlWalters]

nope it's not just you Mr Tickle. My call failed too. TiVoWeb says Failed Service Unavailable. :(

[20039700]

Mine appears to have worked just fine. Not bragging there, just thought i would let you know

[Raisltin Majere]

Mr Tickle, is yours saying it failed at 8:56?

Mine worked fine at 00:56.

[mrtickle]

Thanks for the replies. Yes my tivo tried at 08:53 GMT (09:53 BST), hung around for 3 mins then gave up waiting.

But I'm more worried that I can't ping their server at all either from my tivo bash shell or my own PC. I still can't now, some 3 hours later.

Can anyone else ping that address please? (If your call worked earlier, I expect it must have taken place when the server was working).

[mesaka]

I just made a successful call via my cachecard / internet. Data currently loading.

[Pete77]

Mine worked fine at its fixed daily call time of 3am

[mrtickle]

I just made a successful call via my cachecard / internet. Data currently loading.

Thanks. Maybe it's my ISP then or some other problem. (I still can't ping it, just tried again)

[AMc]

"Thursday 6th Sep at 13:14" Full daily call just worked from here initiated from Tivoweb over Cachecard and clearly loading new data since it's previous call just after midnight.

A ping comes back with a 300m/s response from Windows.

I'm with Virgin broadband over ADSL - could be an ISP routing issue?

[blindlemon]

Mine's OK too, but I have noticed that connections to US-hosted websites in general have been a bit flaky in the last couple of days.

[Pete77]

Mine's OK too, but I have noticed that connections to US-hosted websites in general have been a bit flaky in the last couple of days.

Perhaps hardly surprising when they still don't even seem to have found out how to renew a .co.uk website domain. :(

[mrtickle]

Well I can look up the IP in question (204.176.49.33) and it's apparently jd22.tivo.com. But that's the limit of what my Demon routeing will give me at the moment! :(

Traceroute to the IP was failing after 30 hops but has just worked (!) at 19 hops.

...aha! It's back! Literally while I was typing this :)

[mrtickle]

Just done a call and it got the data immediately. Thanks for the feedback! (I'm a bit jumpy about problems as I'm still getting random corruptions in the /var/ partition of my Samsung HA250JC. joe got corrupted yesterday and I had to ftp a good copy over it.)

[ColinYounger]

I think there are general internet routing issues today - I've had several sites (including this one) apparently disappear from the web for 1-2 mins.

Even trying to reach my company's VPN servers has timed out.

This is both with a VM broadband connection and our backbone-linked company connection.

Curious.

[cwaring]

Thanks for the replies. Yes my tivo tried at 08:53 GMT (09:53 BST), hung around for 3 mins then gave up waiting.
Just to say that my DC went through successfully around a half-hour earlier, at 08:25. VM cable broadband connection.

[CarlWalters]

mine seems OK now - just downloading data. :)

[mrtickle]

What set the alarm bells ringing was the error reported in the TiVo UI - "Failed. Call interrupted". Hadn't seen it before :)

[...coolstream]

Still no joy for me after several days of attempts (both manual and automatic via network).

Logs show that the process gets as far as "Downloading..." and then I get the "Failed. Call interrupted" message. Test calls are OK but then again they don't attempt data downloads so are really only testing whether a connection can be made

Has the problem resolved itself for other users?

Edit:
The only thing I can think of that occured concurrently with this tivo problem is an nstall of newer software on my smoothwall box. The newer version is tighter on security, but since tivo is attempting the download on port 8080, I wouldn't have expected this to cause a problem. I see no obvious port blocking in the firewall logs.

[Pete77]

Still no joy for me after several days of attempts (both manual and automatic).

Logs show that the process gets as far as "Downloading..." and then I get the "Failed. Call interrupted" message.

Has the problem resolved itself for other users?

Have you tried calling Sky Tivo Customer Services to see if they are aware of an issue with getting data this way seeing as how this is the officially supported option used by most ordinary Tivo customers.

[...coolstream]

Have you tried calling Sky Tivo Customer Services to see if they are aware of an issue with getting data this way seeing as how this is the officially supported option used by most ordinary Tivo customers.
Thanks for the quick response, Pete. If I am the only one that still has this problem, then perhaps I should contact them. However, I'd like to find out if my addional thoughts on the firewall issue might have any bearing on my problem before I contact them.

[terryeden]

Try it without the firewall in place - see what happens (keep your other computers disconnected while trying, though.

[Dr_Diablo]

Happens all the tyme, just log in at a later date

[...coolstream]

Try it without the firewall in place - see what happens (keep your other computers disconnected while trying, though.
Seems like a sensible suggestion.

I'll clip the 'red and green cables' that go into the firewall box together to give a straight through connection, switch off all but the tivo and reset tivo to get a new unique IP address. That should do it, shouldn't it?

[...coolstream]

Happens all the tyme, just log in at a later date
Strange that it's been ongoing for a few days though. First time in nearly two years that a manual connection hasn't worked :(

[Pete77]

Strange that it's been ongoing for a few days though. First time in nearly two years that a manual connection hasn't worked :(

Tivo uses a third party dial up network (UUNET) for the UK 0800 point of presence.

Presumably with less and less people using dial up internet connections for anything capacity is being reduced and less staff are being deployed to spotting and fixing faults on the access points in a timely fashion?

[mesaka]

I was helping a friend with a new installation yesterday here in Germany. He is using the internal modem and a local uunet pop number. I couldn't get it to work at all - it may be this problem with the servers or alternatively something to do with the telephone set-up here in Germany. Therefore I will explain what I did in case anyone has any bright ideas....

My friend has DSL but is using the internal TiVo modem, I on the other hand have a networked TiVo getting updates via my network card / internet rather than via dial-up. I have however, tested his TiVo in my house and it will dial-up from there (i.e. the TiVo itself is not faulty). My telephone line is German ISDN and DSL. The cable I used to check the TiVo then links into an extra powered box (splitter?) that was necessary to have because we use a non-ISDN analogue answer phone at home.

When we plug his TiVo at my friends house into the DSL line (with or without a splitter) we just get an error message saying TiVo cannot connect to the server? It gives the same message even if there is no lead attached at all which makes me suspect that the problem relates to the DSL / telephone line.

Anyone got any ideas?

[mrtickle]

Has the problem resolved itself for other users?


It has for me - it was caused by me not backgrounding something in rc.sysinit.author file.

Can you comment out everything that you run at startup - EXCEPT your bash prompt if it's in that file! :D - then reboot and try again?

[mrtickle]

My friend has DSL but is using the internal TiVo modem, I on the other hand have a networked TiVo getting updates via my network card / internet rather than via dial-up. I have however, tested his TiVo in my house and it will dial-up from there (i.e. the TiVo itself is not faulty). My telephone line is German ISDN and DSL. The cable I used to check the TiVo then links into an extra powered box (splitter?) that was necessary to have because we use a non-ISDN analogue answer phone at home.


Ok. But normally to get it to call from outside the UK, you look up the German number and enter it in as a prefix in TiVo's dialling options screen, and possibly some pauses for luck. You can't stop tivo from dialling the UK number, but by doing this you can dial the local German number first, and then the extra digits of the UK number.

See the FAQ at the top of the forum - "Can I use TiVo abroad?" section - for a link to a thread giving a lot more help.


When we plug his TiVo at my friends house into the DSL line (with or without a splitter) we just get an error message saying TiVo cannot connect to the server? It gives the same message even if there is no lead attached at all which makes me suspect that the problem relates to the DSL / telephone line.

Anyone got any ideas?

Well it definitely needs to go through an ADSL filter, so don't bother trying without. Could be a dead modem. The exact error message may help pin it down too. But I'd start by reading the longish thread linked from the FAQ. HTH.

[mesaka]

Ok. But normally to get it to call from outside the UK, you look up the German number and enter it in as a prefix in TiVo's dialling options screen, and possibly some pauses for luck. You can't stop tivo from dialling the UK number, but by doing this you can dial the local German number first, and then the extra digits of the UK number.

Well it definitely needs to go through an ADSL filter, so don't bother trying without. Could be a dead modem. The exact error message may help pin it down too. But I'd start by reading the longish thread linked from the FAQ. HTH.


I obviously did not do a good job with the description. I have set up the German pop number (plus 2 comma's). We have set no dial tone detection and no call waiting detection. At my houuse using the appropriate cable everything works (the modem is therefore definitely working). At my friends house using the same type of cable it doesn't. The only difference is that I have in German terms ISDN/DSL while my friend has normal DSL. It would then appear that it is something to do with me having this powered box, which I assume is a filter, compared to the non-powered filter that my friend has. My only problem is that I don't understand the German telephone system well enouh to know what I can do to remedy it!

[AMc]

As the Tivo modem and cable are OK and assuming Tivo can't connect without the filter under any circumstances (see mrtickle's post) then the filter is the most likely culprit.
Can you try a fax modem call through it from a PC/laptop?
Can you try another filter or another socket?

There is another member on here also running Tivo from Germany - his ID is b166er - might be worth a PM to find out if he knows any more than you about the phones?

[...coolstream]

It has for me - it was caused by me not backgrounding something in rc.sysinit.author file.

Can you comment out everything that you run at startup - EXCEPT your bash prompt if it's in that file! :D - then reboot and try again?
Time to devote the tivo problem has been limited at the moment (although my scheduled recordings dried up this evening). It sure was frightening to see that from Saturday, tivo would appear to have nothing to record, so I addressed the problem again.

I took a look at rc.sysinit.author and couldn't remember if a rem statement would suffice in each line, so I simpy checked if all commands were backgrounded. They were, so I went back to the initial thoughts about the firewall.

For some reason, when I took the firewall out of the loop, tivo attempted the call but the message in the status window informed me 'number unavailable'.

Maybe it was or maybe if there is some kind of network problem, tivo attempts to use the internal modem and since I don't have it connected, it was unsuccessful.

Anyway, back to the firewall reconnected and all machines connected and working as before...

I attempted a daily call initiated in tivoweb via the network and kept a close eye on the firewall log as well.

This time I saw that after several attempts on port 123 (NTP), tivo appears to set the clock and starts housekeeping. The download of data is attempted on port 8080 but each time I added a rule to allow the sorce IP and port from the previously failed attempt to connect to 8080, a new IP and source port attempted to do the same thing. Each new source port appeared to be coming from the tivo server which appears to have a range of addresses (beginning 204.176.49).

Becoming ever more frustrated, I decided to create a more generic rule

External IP ALL
Protocol TCP
Source port HTTP
Destination my tivo address
Destination port 8080

This appears to have worked. Download was successful (over 20 minutes to load data) and I now have a 'Download Succeded' message.

I have just looked at my todo list and it is still empty, but I presume it might take some time to make the required calculations.

I'm off to bed now and will check tivo in the morning and give the final verdict as to whether my tivo is happy or not.

Thanks again to everyone for the suggestions and for letting me know that the problem appeared to be mine and not general.

[...coolstream]

Here's the update as promised...

My todo list has now been populated again :)

I now appreciate that the new firewall program (smoothwall 3.0) was the culprit.

One thing I would love to know is the full range of tivo server addresses so that I could lock down the External Ip range. Does anyone have this information?

[BrianHughes]

I think the destination ports are 80, 8080 & 123.

Your problem seems to be that you're blocking souce ports too, by number. When TCP/IP originates a connection it comes from a random high numbered port but the destination port will be 80 or whatever. What I'm saying is that a http request doesn't originate from port 80 (it can't - that would conflict with your own web server - Tivoweb in this case) so the source port is different from the destintion port.

So you've done the right thing by specifying the source service (ie http) and the destination port (80). I think I'd make sure you do the same for the NTP port (123) to make sure it can set the time.

Sorry, just reread and I see that you want to get the Tivo server addresses - I'm sorry - that I don't know :D

[...coolstream]

I think the destination ports are 80, 8080 & 123.

Your problem seems to be that you're blocking souce ports too, by number. When TCP/IP originates a connection it comes from a random high numbered port but the destination port will be 80 or whatever. What I'm saying is that a http request doesn't originate from port 80 (it can't - that would conflict with your own web server - Tivoweb in this case) so the source port is different from the destintion port.

So you've done the right thing by specifying the source service (ie http) and the destination port (80). I think I'd make sure you do the same for the NTP port (123) to make sure it can set the time.

Sorry, just reread and I see that you want to get the Tivo server addresses - I'm sorry - that I don't know :D
Thanks for your thoughts, Brian.

As far as I am aware, I am allowing these ports not blocking them but I'm obviously doing something wrong as I can now see that the NTP calls are being blocked. (obviously the firewall log doesn't tell me what it is allowing). I just presumed that something must be getting through because the clock setting procedure is, according to tivo, not failing.

For some reason, the fix I reported didn't work last night and once more I am getting call interrupted messages.

I am sorely tempted to revert the firewall box to the older (but obviously less secure) software just to see if a daily call goes through successfully. If more people were confirming tivo server issues in this thread, I would be tempted to leave it a while, but I really suspect that it's my improperly configured tivo access through the firewall that is causing the problems.


***EDIT***
Your thoughts were more useful than you perhaps realised.

I went back to the firewall and looked for a way to allow calls originating from tivo to be allowed without making specific rules. I don't know how or why I had missed this option before.

This time the call was successful and there is no evidence in the firewall log of any activity involving traffic to or from tivo. (even NTP isn't mentioned). So it looks like what you said was correct and my thoughts now are:

allowing traffic to tivo through the firewall did not solve the problem, but allowing traffic from tivo did.

This of course could still be pure bunkum if it is in fact the case that the tivo servers are sporadically playing up which several replies to this thread are implying.