Hacked 6.2 keeps disconnecting from network

[mnrbradley]

Perhaps someone can help me troubleshoot an issue I am having. It may be a problem related to my router, I'm not sure, but I can't seem to figure it out.

I had an HDVR2 hacked with 4.x on a wireless network. Everything seemed to work perfectly, but I wanted a faster network connection, so I decided to upgrade to 6.2 using slices (to keep my wireless network settings). I got it upgraded and everything works, but every couple of days, my tivo drops off of the network. All I have to do is reboot the tivo and I'm back up and running, but I can't figure out why it's dropping off of my network. The reason I think it might be related to the upgrade is b/c this never happened with 4.x, and I had that up and running for several weeks.

Does anyone have an idea where I should look to start troubleshooting this?

[PlainBill]

By any chance did you manually load the network drivers in rc.sysinit.author or test.conf? Doing that is known to cause problems.

PlainBill

[mnrbradley]

No, I didn't, although I was thinking of backporting the usb drivers to see if that speeds things up and perhaps solves this problem.

That brings up an oddity - when I had 4.0.1 hacked, test.conf was in the root folder. Now, there is no test.conf. Does that make a difference?

[PlainBill]

Test.conf is not necessary. With 6.2 it is a bad idea to load network drivers in either test.conf or rc.sysinit.author. You CAN set the ip address in rc.sysinit.author if you rename dhclient. Setting the ip address in rc.sysinit.author without renaming dhclient gives results similar to what you are observing - after a period of time the ip address changes. However, that doesn't seem to match your problem.

I don't use wireless (I have an aversion to broadcasting information to everyone in the neighborhood), so all I can suggest at this point is to check the logs and see if something shows up.

PlainBill

[Jamie]

TYou CAN set the ip address in rc.sysinit.author if you rename dhclient.

Even this is a bad idea if you want MRV to work reliably. Here's a good summary post explaining why. If you really want to set the ip address in a script, you probably want to run /sbin/hotplug as advised there. This lets the tivo software know it should use it for MRV broadcasts.

[PlainBill]

Even this is a bad idea if you want MRV to work reliably. Here's a good summary post explaining why. If you really want to set the ip address in a script, you probably want to run /sbin/hotplug as advised there. This lets the tivo software know it should use it for MRV broadcasts.

Jamie, I agree. It may be a matter of perception, but IMHO, 6.2 responds very nicely to a minimalist hacking approach (a killhdinitrd 5.1.5 kernel, rename netfilter-enable, add rc.sysinit.author, then run superpatch67).

I've been running four systems that way for the past six months without any problems. Granted, I'm not using wireless networking, but hmo/mrv works flawlessly with the stock drivers.

The process for hacking is well documented, the process for updating to the backported drivers is well documented, but we seem to be having a lot of people who are having problems because they are trying to perform unnatural acts with the usb drivers!

PlainBill

[Jamie]

...but we seem to be having a lot of people who are having problems because they are trying to perform unnatural acts with the usb drivers!

Part of this is probably historical. Things used to be different and I suspect people are still doing what they had to do with 3.x.

[mnrbradley]

I initially hacked 4.x and set up my network from there b/c I also have an aversion to an open network. Therefore, I am using WEP encryption. I also have my router assigning an IP address via the Static DHCP setting (to the MAC address of the wireless NIC). I do not have any IP addresses set up in my rc.sysinit.author file and I didn't touch anything with the DHCP client of the tivo. Is that possibly my problem? Should I not assign a static IP using the Static DHCP of my router? If that's not it, what log files should I search in? Any help is much appreciated.

[mnrbradley]

FYI - in case anyone else has a similar problem - it seems to have been my router causing the problems. Setting a static IP in the router had some negative effect. I don't know if it's a bug in the DLink Router or something else, but when I removed the static IP and let the router assign the dynamic IP to the tivo box, it seems to have solved the issue.

[cheer]

I initially hacked 4.x and set up my network from there b/c I also have an aversion to an open network. Therefore, I am using WEP encryption. I also have my router assigning an IP address via the Static DHCP setting (to the MAC address of the wireless NIC). I do not have any IP addresses set up in my rc.sysinit.author file and I didn't touch anything with the DHCP client of the tivo. Is that possibly my problem? Should I not assign a static IP using the Static DHCP of my router? If that's not it, what log files should I search in? Any help is much appreciated.

Just a couple of network-y points:

• WEP affects network speed/performance (in the negative sense)
• WEP isn't secure, really...can be hacked fairly easily

So, if you're going to run a wireless network, keep these items in mind. I run wired as much as possible, but in a family of four laptops, wireless is definitely a piece of the action. No SSID broadcast, WPA, MAC-exclusive filters, etc., are about as good as I can hope for. (And only the laptops and a couple of print servers run wireless...Xboxes, desktops, Tivos, etc. all run wired.)