Tips of the Trade

[Politica]

How do I increase the speed of my Telnet throughput? (like I'm a 10 year old)

I have a Tivo Series 1, with an ethernet card installed. I can Telnet to it just fine, using application called Staff-FTP. These are the instructions I followed (Read my question after these steps.):


ON THE PC, I:
1. I Clicked on "Start" icon
2. I Picked "Run"
3. In the "Run" dialog box, typd "cmd" (without quotes) and hit <enter>
4. In the new window, type "Telnet 192.168.1.131" <enter>
(or whatever the IP address is for your Tivo)
You should then see a brief message saying "connecting to 192.168 ..."
Then the prompt: "Tivo >" (I think that is the prompt I set up)
5. Type "psftp" <enter>
You should get back a single line with "grep ftp" at the end
6. Type "mfs" <enter>
This will start the mfs_ftp program on the Tivo
7. Type "psftp" <enter>
This time you should get two lines back. The new one has
"tivosh var/mfs_ftp ..." at the end
8. Type "Exit" <enter>
You should now be out of the Tivo and back to your PC's CMD
window. Close the window
9. Take a breath !

Back in Windows XP:
10. Setup up the folder you want to use to hold your Tivo files.
11. Start up your FTP program (CuteFTP ?)
12. Set the "Local" folder to the one you want to use on your PC
(see step 10)
13. Set up the connection to the "remote" computer (i.e. the Tivo):
Host is: 192.168.1.131 (or whatever)
Port is: 3105 (very important)

Many FTP programs allow you to check a box for "anonymous" logins
If yours doesn't, use:
Login is: anonymous
Password is: "user@anonymous.com"

14. Have your FTP program connect to the Tivo.
Sometimes it takes a couple of tries.
15. Once the connection is made, change the remote (i.e. Tivo)
directory to "\tmf"
16. Start tranferring file(s).
17. When you are finished with your transfers, simply have the FTP
program on you PC disconnect from the Tivo and close the PC
program.

The problem arose when I started transfering. The transfer rate is about 22kb/sec!! At that rate, it would take me over 86 hours to transfer a 3 hour football game! Can anyone tell me why this is so slow and what I can do to increase the transfer rate????

[jeanlee411]

Very quiet. Probably not quiet enough for the bedroom, but fine in any other room. 8C temp difference - as reported by the Tivo.

I think this tip should be worthwhile, as it helped all 4 of my tivos boot faster, (on one by 3 minutes, 10 seconds on the least tweaked one, not much, but its a start) and I am sure it will help many others.

Add a 'sleep 300' in rc.sysinit right before executing any of the hack scripts you might use, saves overhead during the initial bootup, and will allow the 'acquiring satellite information' part to finnish faster.

[cojonesdetoro]

Actually, it's a good idea to run all hack scripts in rc file as a background process with a delay like below. running in background let's the rc process finish. If one of your scripts hangs while running in foreground, it might prevent you from telnetting in. The delay also let's you have time to telnet in and fix something if one of your scripts goes horribly wrong and makes the box unreachable as soon as it runs.


(
sleep 300

<- hack script commands here

)&


The way I do it is I put all my scripts in /etc/rc.hacks and run that from the main rc scipt as a background process:

/etc/rc.hacks &

The rc.hacks file looks like above witth the initial 300 sec. delay but no parens. If something causes a reboot loop I can telnet in quickly during the 300 second window and rename /etc/rc.hacks to something else so it's no longer in the boot sequence. Then I can run it manually to see where it's screwing up. Once I fix the problem I rename it back so it runs at boot.

[unitron]

I like to replace the torx screws with standard phillips screws the first time I upgrade a box. It seems like I can never find my T10 or T15 when something goes wrong and I'm in a hurry...

Good idea, but I'm starting to think I'd be better off with thumbscrews or velcro or a zipper.

[rrohanwague]

My HR10-250 has been hacked and i was wondering.Because everything I've found so far tells you what to do, but not how to do it.

1. Install mfs_ftp into your Tivo.

2. Go to this directory and unzip this file.
And so and so on...I've read all the guides and they do have some information, but I want to start

Thanks to your post I may be able to do just that.