some patches in pursuit of eliminating advertisments

[woracan]

After making a patch to tivoapp, it has been nice to no longer have the mail icon turn yellow when a new message (a.k.a. advertisement) arrives on my TiVo. The new messages are still are still being received, but I have to actually open the Messages screen to know if there are any new messages. That is great, but what if I want to keep the new message notification but no longer receive any advertisement messages from DTV? I've looked tivoapp over and have not found where these particular messages are being received so I thought I'd start looking into dssapp for a possible solution.

After changing my startup scripts to load the debug version of dssapp for my HR10-250, dssappAV-sniffer, I found that not only does it log tons of stuff into /var/log/kernel, but it pollutes it with lots of carriage returns "^M" near the ends of some lines. (I say "near" the ends because there is a space after each "^M".) Anyway, here are two patches to dssappAV-sniffer that will eliminate the "^M" pollution it would otherwise generate.

dssappAV-sniffer patch to keep undesirable \r characters out of /var/log/kernel

at VMA 0x437004 change bytes 2404000d to 2404000a
at VMA 0x436ce4 change bytes 2408000d to 2408000a

After applying the patches and rebooting, I noticed that there was still some "^M" pollution but dssapp was not to blame. Here is a patch to e2fsck to make it play nice.

e2fsck patch  to keep undesirable \r characters out of /var/log/kernel
echo -ne "\x00\x00\x00\x00" | dd conv=notrunc of=/sbin/e2fsck bs=1 seek=115816

Oh, and I have only tested this on 6.4a because as far as I know, that is the latest software version to run on an HR10-250.

While I have found strings in dssapp containing the word "Email", I have not yet found the functions in dssapp that receive the advertisement messages, but at least now the logs are less annoying to look at.

[woracan]

In attempting to give meaningful names to as many functions as possible, I came across a patent that should be helpful in understanding the meaning of some of the acronyms scattered throughout dssapp.

[woracan]

I seem to have found a dssapp patch location to eliminate receiving of DirecTV mail messages. Previously, I have observed that unopened messages would reappear several hours after rebooting. I have also observed that simply opening a message does not delete it, but after rebooting, that previously opened message will be gone forever.

For dssappAV, patch VMA 0x43a0ec from 90630000 to 24030014 and VMA 0x43a680 from 9222000a to 24020001.

More than likely you will be using dssappAV, but if you want to run the "logging like there is no tomorrow" version of dssapp, you will want to change your startup script to run dssappAV-sniffer, and patch VMA 0x43a15c from 90630000 to 24030014 and VMA 0x43a6f0 from 9222000a to 24020001.

To apply the patch to dssappAV, use the following commands while in the tvbin directory:

echo -ne "\x24\x03\x00\x14" | dd conv=notrunc of=dssappAV bs=1 seek=237804
echo -ne "\x24\x02\x00\x01" | dd conv=notrunc of=dssappAV bs=1 seek=239232

To apply the patch to dssappAV-sniffer, use the following commands while in the tvbin directory:

echo -ne "\x24\x03\x00\x14" | dd conv=notrunc of=dssappAV-sniffer bs=1 seek=237916
echo -ne "\x24\x02\x00\x01" | dd conv=notrunc of=dssappAV-sniffer bs=1 seek=239344

My HR10-250 running software version 6.4a has been running with the dssappAV patches for over 30 hours and has not received any email. Before applying the patches, I made sure to leave several unopened emails which would have reappeared within 12 hours.

[woracan]

I don't have a DirecTV TiVo that is on the Provo platform, and am not sure why anyone would still be using one, but if you have one and want to patch your dssapp or dssapp-sniffer, try the following commands.

For dssapp:

echo -ne "\x24\x03\x00\x14" | dd conv=notrunc of=dssapp bs=1 seek=242316
echo -ne "\x24\x02\x00\x01" | dd conv=notrunc of=dssapp bs=1 seek=243680

For dssapp-sniffer:

echo -ne "\x24\x03\x00\x14" | dd conv=notrunc of=dssapp-sniffer bs=1 seek=242428
echo -ne "\x24\x02\x00\x01" | dd conv=notrunc of=dssapp-sniffer bs=1 seek=243792

If I didn't make any typos that should make your old standard definition DirecTV TiVo run without receiving DirecTV email.