[drchelsealynn]

Alright folks, I've tried desprately to find the info I need on the 'net and I'm coming up woefully short.

The background:
I'm a college student. I live in a dorm with a PBX phone system, so I can't use it to dial out. I have a brand new Series2 box and a D-Link DUB-E100 network card to connect it to our campus network, and thus to the outside world.

I've been using the ,#401 jimmy to get it to use the network connection for guided setup and it seems to be using the card alright, because I don't get any errors initially.

Here's where the problem comes in. When connecting, it goes through "connecting" and "negotiating" just fine. When it starts "configuring" I get the error "Failed while configuring" and then the option to retry or change my dialing options. Tried multiple times, same result. I tried doing the "test connection" and got the same result there too.

I reset the box using the "configure as demo model" trick. No dice.

I know the network card works, I know the jack works. Same with both USB ports.

I tried downloading the PC software to connect to the box; the software presents my tivo as an option in the preferences pane for "Which tivos can connect to this machine" but when I try to check the tivo now playing list, I get an "unable to locate" error. Since I'm stuck in the guided set-up, I'm not too suprised by this, but it might be useful to know.

I contacted TiVo service and they suggested I contact our IT guys and make sure all the necessary ports are open. I did so, and they say that they "don't block any ports," as long as the connection is being initiated from within the network (which i'm assuming is the case.) There is a firewall, but he says it "shouldn't be blocking it".

So right now, the basic analysis is "something is blocking the traffic out, we don't know what". The IT guy is willing to look into the problem, but he needs to know a lot of information about how the traffic looks when the TiVo is trying to connect. What servers (IPs) is it connecting to? On what ports? What protocols? (They do bandwidth shaping based on traffic protocol - web traffic gets highest priority, file transfers lower [I tried to list protocols, but the forum yelled at me]) Is something from the outside world trying to connect to the TiVo? I can find a lot of trouble-shooting stuff, but very little actual nuts-and-bolts information about what it's doing. Once I have this information, we can track the TiVo activity and hopefully let it out to the outside world.

If you have any information, any suggestions, I'd be very appreciative. I'm honestly near the end of my rope.

 

[petew]

Can the IT guy come over and use a sniffer to check what Tivo is doing? It probably the quickest way to find out what is failing.

Alternatively there is a DIY way but it's not simple and you'll need to borrow a HUB (not a switch). You would connect a patch cable from the HUB to the wall and patch cables from your Tivo to the HUB and from your PC to the HUB. Then download the open source Ethereal packet analyzer and capture network traffic while running Tivo config. Alternatively the full product Microsoft Network Monitor (not the free version included with windows) can also be used.

I can help you analyze the results if you get that far.

 

[drchelsealynn]

Unfourtunately I don't have a way to set up a packet sniffer and I doubt the IT guy's going to make house calls. Does anyone know what the TiVo and the servers are trying to do? As far as I know the only traffic that's blocked is when something on the outside is trying to initiate a connection to something on the inside, but I would think it's going the other way.... Is some server on the outside trying to initiate a connection to the TiVo?

Is there anyone with the inside line at TiVo who can take a look at the logs and see how far the connection got, see what exactly is failing? I'm sure that if I tried to call and ask, they would just give me the phone equivalent of a blank stare...