Fred1 said:
Hey thanks Anndra,
Am back home tonight so will try an X10 appliance module on the UPS Tivo side.
Good timing as I am away next week as well.
You never mentioned whether or not TiVoWeb was still accessible. If it was, you could have reset using the key sequence (via the web remote):
livetv (so you know that the next button takes you to the tivo menu)
tivo
surfdown (the page down button)
select
surfdown
up
select
surfup
select
thumbsdown
thumbsdown
thumbsdown
enter
I assume that even if you did have TiVoWeb access, you wouldn't have known the key sequence (I didn't till I just made a note of it now).
I also wonder whether the solution I use to reboot a remote PC might be adaptable to work on TiVo's too. I have a couple of PC's in New York that I normally connect to via VNC or PCAnywhere. Occasionally they won't respond but are still alive. So I got them both running Trillian, logged into AIM on their own unique ID's. One of the features of Trillian is that you can intercept messages and perform word matching on them. So if I send a special keyword in an IM message to one of them. it gets a hit on the wordmatch and executes a program. So I make them run the command: shutdown -s -f -t 02 (which restarts).
Presumably there's an IM client available for Linux, perhaps one with the same feature. If not, perhaps a cron task that's expecting a tivoweb access at least once a day/week, and if it doesn't get one, it reboots.
Alternatively, and cheaper than buying an X-10 device (whatever that is) would be a simple cron task that reboots at 3 am. The advantage of this is that it's a requested soft boot. The operating system will handle it cleanly. Unlike a rapid loss of power from another method, which can always lead to the chance of some bad sectors.