[rescue] TiVo Hack

[joshua d boyd]

On Mon, Aug 13, 2001 at 12:01:10PM -0400, Brian Hechinger wrote:
> it runs out of his office, through the hallway, down the stairs, across the
> dining room, across the livingroom and into the tivo.  no other option without
> fishing it through the walls which both he and i agreed would be a giant pain in
> the ass, although it's whats gonna happen if he can't get this wireless card
> working.  he plugged it into his server and so far

See, I just went and ran it through the walls.  This is reasonably easy if
you have either basement or attic access, or are just going from room to
the next between joists.  For appartment dwellers, it would be a real
pain, but you made it sound like he has a house.

<snipped wireless problems> 
> so it's not looking so good if he can't even get it to work in a normal PC what
> are his chances of getting it to work in a tivo. :)

Especially if it needs DMA or other ISA features that make for smart ISA
cards.  Apparently ISA is just memory mapped currently, and the card isn't
really allowed to have any smarts in communicating back to the
machine.  I don't even know if interrupts are allowed.
 
> i don't know anything about any of this, other than what was demonstrated to me
> over the weekend.  i like this network thing, and i'm going to have to research
> it further and see if i can get the tivo to use the NFS mount full time.  i
> don't know if this is a good idea or not, since his NFS mount kept hanging, but
> on the other hand something ran away on his linux server which was showing a
> load average of 12, so that could have been the problem as well (he's a 
> developer, not an admin, so his solution was to reboot the linux server before
> i could poke at it to see what happened *G*)

>From time to time that has been my solution to linux problems, I'm sad to
admit.
 
> anyway, i'll talk to him and see if i can get any info out of him (he's easier
> to understand in email since he can stop and think about what he's saying 
> instead of just rambling/mumbling/stuttering, so i'll let you know.)

Hehe.  He must be a fairly good developer then...
 
> ps: moved to geeks since i think we are stretching rescue here on this one now.

Yeah, if only they had had the smarts to use embeded SPARCs instead of the
PPC chip, then we wouldn't have any problem.

-- 
Joshua D. Boyd
http://www.cs.millersville.edu/~jdboyd/