I took the Netgear WG111 V2 back to Fry's tonight. While I was standing in line I was talking to a guy about the network adapter and how I needed the older version. He said I should check out PC Club. On a whim I stopped at Best Buy on my way home to see if they had the WG111 V1. I went to the wall where they have all their networking gear and looked. I found a few adapters made by Netgear that looked a lot like it and then down on the bottom shelf I found the one I was looking for. I was surprised by how many they had, at least 20 or so. There's even a sticker on the box that says "TiVo Compatable". Note to Best Buy; put some of those wifi adapters on the shelf next to the TiVos! I would have bought it the same day I bought the TiVo if they had done that!

Anyway, I got it home, plugged it in and it worked right off the bat. I'm a little disappointed that it doesn't support WPA. I had just got everything on my network configured with WPA recently and now I had to go back to 128 bit WEP!

Well, my Tivo is all updated and it looks like my Netgear WG111 V2 does not work. So, back to Fry's it goes

Well, I finally did it. I went out this past weekend and bought a Tivo. I have been talking about building either a MythTV box or a Windows MediaCenter box for quite a while now. I finally decided to just spend the $200 and get an 80 hour Tivo Series 2 instead. A lot cheaper than building a PC and it really does what I want anyway. Record TV, display photos and play MP3s. I had a gift card from Best Buy, so I bought it there. I originally bought a Linksys  USB200M 10/100 ethernet adapter. It worked fine, but my network setup didn't seem to work right. I have a Linksys WRT54G in my computer room. I tried putting my old Linksys BEFSR41 router in my entertainment center and I plugged in a Linksys WET11 (802.11b/Ethernet bridge) into the WAN port. I assigned a different subnet to this network. The Tivo was able to connect to the Tivo service through the network, but it was unable to see my PC running the Tivo desktop software. When I just plug the wireless bridge into the USB ethernet adapter it works fine and detects the music and photos I shared on my desktop. So, I decided to take the ethernet adapter back and get a Netgear WG111. It is a USB 802.11g adapter. My Tivo is still running the 5.3 version of the software. I requested an update to 7.1 and I am still waiting for it. Unfortunately, since I took back the USB ethernet adapter, I have to use the phone line to contact the Tivo service. I don't have a phone jack near the Tivo, so I have been stringing a phone cable across the room at night and then unplugging it in the morning. Hopefully the 7.1 update will happen soon! One issue though is that Tivo says only the WG111 V1 will work, but I have a WG111 V2. I read some posts on different blogs that some people have had luck using the V2. I'm crossing my fingers!

I decided it was time to stop using the SVEASOFT firmware on my Linksys router. I'm not real keen on some of the things I have heard about the people behind it. So, I decided to install Wifi-Box instead. I made one crucial mistake though. I forgot to reset to factory defaults before flashing the new firmware. Once the upgrade was done, I could no longer access the router through the LAN ports. The weird thing was that I could access it through the WAN port! The WAN port had taken the address 192.168.1.1, which is normally what the LAN side is set to. I telnetted in and looked at the nvram settings and noticed a bunch of old settings from the SVEASOFT firmware and realized what had happened. I tried holding in the reset button for 30 (and even more) seconds. That didn't seem to help. Then I found a website describing a way to truly clear the nvram here. It involves opening the router and shorting two pins on the flash chip, so it is not for the feint of heart. Well that seemed to do the trick, I was then able to TFTP the official linksys firmware back on the router and everything worked. Then i went ahead and flashed it with the WiFi-Box firmware. The main reason I want to use this firmware is so I can use MRTG to do some monitoring and this firmware provides SNMP.

Sveasoft is offering their WRT54G firmware for free. You can read about it here. I like it because it allows you to configure certain options that weren't available in the official firmware. Like being able to select the NTP server to use. It also adds some things like SSHD and a PPTPD server. Although, I haven't been able to get the PPTPD server to allow me to connect yet. Maybe this new version will have that fixed. I was using an earlier version and haven't installed the latest one yet.

So, I got the router hooked up and it is working well so far. Someone pointed out that there is a security related bug so I have flashed it with the beta firmware available from Linksys. I have no real way to measure this, but websites seem to come up faster with this router than the old one.

I'm looking forward to hacking this thing :)

I picked up a Linksys WRT54G wireless router today. Hopefully it won't suffer from the problems of my old Linksys BEFSR41 v2! Haven't installed it or even taken out of the box yet, so I'll post about it later.

There is a cool app called MiniStumbler that lets you search for and document wireless networks with your PPC. A new version has just been released and it now supports more wireless cards, including my Socket CF Wireless card. Now I just need to get a bluetooth GPS!

After upgrading the firmware on my linksys router I had some problems, but by turning off UPnP and disabling logging, the router hasn't required a reboot for a few days now. Hopefully Linksys will release a more stable firmware revision soon!

I flashed my Linksys BEFSR41 v2 router to firmware 1.45.7. That was a mistake. Every few hours it would require a reset. I couldn't even get to the configuration web page. I turned off UPnP and that seems to help a bit, but I still had to reset once today. I am going to keep shutting stuff off until I get it stable. If that doesn't work I'll try downgrading the firmware. Linksys, are you listening