"Lost" my TiVo on the LAN - don't want to have to open it

As per title really. I took my TiVo into work to fit a new drive and had it on the LAN there on an arbitrary address on a class B network (therefore huge). Now I can't find it on the LAN back home. I thought I'd had it on the home network since then but I've pinged the whole subnet range with a script to no avail.

Now it is hacked and running telnetd, so will I be able to get a console up by plugging in the serial cable I have? Or would I have had to set up tty or whatnot first? My unix knowhow is fairly basic so I appreciate that this might be a stupid question. My laptop has no serial port so I can't test it right now.

Thanks

 

Yeah I know, but the problem is that it was a while ago (I moved house as well) and I have no idea what that IP was. I seem to remember deliberately picking an IP well out of the way of the rest of the kit at work so I'll never be able to guess (approx 65k addresses in a class B). If I can get a console up on the serial port I can simply re-run nic_config. Is it possible? Or can you only get a console up on there at boot time?

EDIT. Got him. I just suddenly realised that I do have a crossover cable in the house. I used that plus an RJ45 coupler and hooked TiVo up directly to my laptop, then set my laptop's NIC to be on that subnet, then pinged the broadcast address. Sure enough, TiVo replied! That's saved a lot of messing about making the Linux boot disks and stuff.

Hopefully this should help someone else out in future.

 

Regarding my original enquiry about a serial console, I found this somewhere on the forum and added it to my rc.sysinit.author:

/bin/bash </dev/ttyS3 >& /dev/ttyS3 &

I'll try and find a USB to Serial dongle to check it but it should work, right?