First the Tivo died. And then it got interesting…

Our DirecTV Tivo died on Thursday night, going into an endless reboot loop. Investigating through the great knowledge base of the web, I determined it was due to one of two possible thing: a bad hard drive, or a bad power supply. We took the most likely problem (hard drive) and decided to try to fix that. A little online shopping turned up a Western Digital 320 GB hard drive at Staples for $89. W00t! On Friday night we stopped by Staples and picked up the drive. One part down. In talking with roho it turned out that we had two options: 1) try to recapture our data off the old drive, a dicey process, and re-image the new drive with the old image. 2) Start out fresh, but add networking functionality (which has never been available to DirecTV Tivos) and make it so that the Tivo could grab data of the net. This would allow us to drop our little-used $15/month phone line. Well, sign me up!

So Roho came over on Saturday and put a shiny new disk image on the new drive using InstantCake, as well as PTVNet for the network functionality. Everything went incredibly smoothly, and in a little over an hour we had a shiny new DirecTV Tivo with 304 hours capacity (up from 72 hours)! Then, today, Dan and I did a little more shopping at Best Buy and Staples and picked up a Linksys WRT54G router and a Linksys USB/ethernet adapter. When we got back, we took things in order:
1.) Connected the new WRT54G to the DSL modem.
2.) Reconfigured out existing WRT54GS router (flashed with DD-WRT) to be a client bridge.
3.) Hooked the DirecTV Tivo to the bridge.
4.) Hooked our Slingbox to the bridge and to the Tivo.
5.) Reconfigured the Airport Express to play well with the new router.
6.) Reconfigured the MP3 server downstairs to play well with the new router.
7.) Installed the Slingbox client on Dan’s Motorola Q, so he now has full control and sound and video with the Tivo from his cell phone.
8.) Installed the Slingbox client software to both of our laptops so we both now have full control and sound and video from the Tivo.
9.) Squee-ed in delight at full control and database access to the Tivo over the web interface (alas, no sound or video there, but who cares? It’s more than we had.)

Now this omits some of the more exciting parts of the operation, including a disastrous foray into converting our network from WEP to WPA (which slowed everything to a crawl) and back to WEP, the discovery that wireless SSID’s are indeed case sensitive, and that sometimes holding down the Linksys router reset button to clear it doesn’t cut it – it takes tapping it like a rabbit on meth to do the job.

Of the above, I’d say I did half, and Dan did half. He was very patient with me as I got more and more frustrated, until it all just kind of fell into place.

Much to my amazement everything now works exactly the way it should. And damn, it’s mighty nifty!