Tivo CacheCard Network connection gone.

[mercuryraven]

I have already posted this in the TiVo Underground Forum, but not sure if it was the right place??? I thought the crowed in here being UK based may be more suitable?

I have a series 1 Tivo in the Uk. I recently upgraded with a CacheCard so that I could get updates over the network as I don't have a land line.

It all installed fine and was working for a couple of weeks, with TivoWeb installed, Suggs and Endpad all working.

I made a change to rc.sysinit.author to change the settings for suggs when it started and also to change the endpad settings, I then restarted the Tivo and since then It has been unable to connect to the network to make the daily call, and I have been unable to connect via TivoWeb, but suggs and endpad are both running fine still

I have checked out the setting on my router and I can't see anything in the logs that show that the Tivo is trying to connect via the router, the light on the router for the port that it is plugged into does not light up anymore. I have tried a different network cable, a different port in the router and neither of these make a difference. I have verified the Port and the cable using my laptop to confirm that they work OK.

I pulled the drive and have put it into a PC and booted up using an mfstools bootcd with the nic_install stuff on it. I re-ran nic_install and made sure all the config was correct for the card adn then put it back into the Tivo. This still has not made a difference.

Finally I pulled the drive again and put into PC and decided to try and check out the logs but have been having no luck mounting the Tivo drive using the mfstools boot cd. I have the drive in the PC as the Secondary slave, as the cable for the Primary only has one connector. I can see that the Tivo drive is hdd but trying to mount anything on it gives me the error "Must specify filesystem type"

i.e.
mount /dev/hdd7 /mnt/tivo

Does anyone have any suggestions or advice as I feel I have tried everything that I can for now and without being able to get to any of the files on the drive I can't view any of the logs to get any further?

Cheers.

[Cainam]

A couple of possibilities spring to mind...

1) When you edited rc.sysinit.author, did you do so on a PC and then FTP the file back? It could be that the file contains the Windows line endings, and is messing it up.

You do not say if telnet is still working, but if it is you could connect to your Tivo and use the joe editor or something to check that there are no dodgy line endings on that file.

2) When you edited rc.sysinit.author, did you make sure that EVERYTHING runs in the background i.e. has a & on the end? It is well documented that the daily calls often do not work unless everything runs in the background.

Again, you could use the joe editor to add & to those lines that need it

3) Regarding reading the logs..it is possible that you might need to turn on byteswapping at the boot prompt so it can see the data properly. I think the command to run is
hdx=bswap

at the boot prompt, so in you case it would be hdd=bswap

Let us know how you get on

[Johnbyte]

A couple of possibilities spring to mind...

2) When you edited rc.sysinit.author, did you make sure that EVERYTHING runs in the background i.e. has a & on the end? It is well documented that the daily calls often do not work unless everything runs in the background.



Thanks, Cainam, I've made the same mistake, causing daily calls to fail. I just ftp'd back the old version of rc.sysinit.author to correct it. I kind of guessed it was to do with things running in the foreground rather than in the background but wasn't sure how to put it right. Now I know...

[mercuryraven]

Thanks for the reply cainam, I have answered your questions below :

A couple of possibilities spring to mind...
1) When you edited rc.sysinit.author, did you do so on a PC and then FTP the file back? It could be that the file contains the Windows line endings, and is messing it up.


I edited the file in situe over telnet.


You do not say if telnet is still working, but if it is you could connect to your Tivo and use the joe editor or something to check that there are no dodgy line endings on that file.


Telnet and FTP are not longer working. There seems to be no attempt to make a network connection at all. The light on the router does not come on for the port that Timmy is plugged into, however if I plug the cable into my laptop the light comes on as soon as an ip address is allocated, could there be a fault with the CacheCard Network port?


2) When you edited rc.sysinit.author, did you make sure that EVERYTHING runs in the background i.e. has a & on the end? It is well documented that the daily calls often do not work unless everything runs in the background.

Again, you could use the joe editor to add & to those lines that need it


I used the joe editor to do so and I think I did make sure I put everything in the background. (BTW My prefered editor is vi, I find it much easier to use :-) )


3) Regarding reading the logs..it is possible that you might need to turn on byteswapping at the boot prompt so it can see the data properly. I think the command to run is
hdx=bswap

at the boot prompt, so in you case it would be hdd=bswap

Let us know how you get on

I have just tried to boot with bootswapping turned on, using the command you have given above does not work, it returns "Could not find kernal image: hdd=bswap"

Entering swap at the boot prompt to boot with DMA disabled, byte-swapping enabled fails also with the following :

"Kernal panic: No init found. Try passing init= option to kernal."

I did a quick search in this forum but didn't get any results that matched that error returned.

Cheers

[mercuryraven]

After a bit of a struggle I have now fixed my problem.

I used a different boot CD in my PC which allowed me to mount /var no problems with Byte-swapping on, one problem sorted.

I then edited the rc.sysinit.author again using joe and found my error, I had somehow managed to put the & from the final line of the file on a seperate line, so suggs was not running in the background. I tried to resolve using joe but decided that i could not use joe as it didn't appear to do what i wanted, so used vi instead. Removed the drive from the PC, re-installed in Timmy and all is now working :)

[Cainam]

Result!

[verses]

All hail vi! ;)

My word docs are littered with ':wq's where I've tried to save and exit :o