Slingbox Setup with Wireless Ethernet Bridge
From time to time, I’ll post something here that’s primarily a note to myself. You might wonder why I don’t simply write this down in a document and store it on my computer someplace. In addition to my hope that these notes may offer some value to others as well, the reason is largely organizational. After all, as I back up stuff, move files around and archive things, eventually I can’t remember where I put that one file across all of the various terabytes of storage. But in the case of notes I’ve left for myself on this site, I can always find them in an instant.
So last night I was wrapping up work for the day at around 10:00 and decided that I should plug the Slingbox back in, after not having used it for a while. Actually, it was Apple who had suggested it to me earlier in the day, since we’re going to be on vacation this weekend and it might be fun to use the Slingbox while traveling. Because the Slingbox SOLO doesn’t have built-in wireless, and because it’s situated at the opposite end of the house from my main router, I needed to hook up a second router in bridge mode. Unfortunately, the network setup confounded me for some time, as I seemed unable to remember how to properly set up my second wireless router. I finally figured out what I was doing wrong, so here I’ll describe the setup that worked for me.
First of all, my primary router is a Linksys WRT54GL version 1.1, running Tomato firmware 1.25. The secondary router is an older WRT54G version 2, running HyperWRT Thibor 15c, which I put into bridge mode so the Slingbox could be plugged into it and still have access to my wireless network. With that established, here are the steps:
Primary Router
- Set up Static DHCP so the secondary router always gets the same IP address. I assigned it 192.168.1.149, which is the last assignable IP in my DHCP range.
- Forward the Slingbox port (5001 by default) to the secondary router’s internal address (192.168.1.149 in my case).
Secondary Router
- Change the router’s mode to Wireless Ethernet Bridge.
- Configure the wireless settings to match those on the primary router (SSID, security type, password, etc.)
- Change the Internet access mode to “Static IP.”
- For the router’s Internet IP, enter the same IP you assigned it in your primary router. (Again, in my case that was 192.168.1.149.)
- Enter your primary router’s address in the Gateway field — mine is 192.168.1.1.
- Enter a subnet mask of 255.255.255.0.
- For the router’s internal address, I think I entered 192.168.1.2. I don’t think this is too important.
- Disable the DHCP server. A device that you plug into the secondary router will be assigned an IP by the primary router.
That should get it working. Strangely, when I was Googling around for help on setting this up, I found a huge load of articles that all seemed to describe a different way of getting this to work, and none of them gave me the right advice. In the end, amusingly, it was an article in Sling Media’s own knowledge base that gave me the clue I needed — I should have gone there to begin with.
2009: The Year Entropy Accelerated
As the ill-fated 2009 starts to wind itself down, it’s making it more clear than ever that it’s not going to let us forget how much pain and suffering it inflicted on us all. Some more than others, obviously, but by-and-large it’s been a pretty depressing year. My family in particular was hit harder by more cataclysmic events at once than at any point in my lifetime, with my dad losing his job due to the slowing economy, the deaths of two family members (just a month apart, no less) and a myriad of other problems besides.
Although Apple and I have fared pretty well in comparison to many other Americans — even other members of our families — we’ve still received a disproportionate amount of negative reinforcement from The Powers That Be. This week, in particular, was like a microcosm of that very idea, presenting us with one out-of-left-field event after another: breakdowns, unforeseen events, ridiculous instances of lightning striking twice. The Second Law of Thermodynamics seems to have conspired against us to accelerate entropy to an almost comical level.
I used to do a lot of bitching on this blog. Not so much anymore. But today is one of those days where I feel like if I don’t get it off my chest here, I’ll take it out on someone who doesn’t deserve it, so away we go with a little old-fashioned rant.
Forfeiting the Comcast Battle (But Not Quite the War)
My seemingly eternal struggle with Comcast over the billing and service for my TiVo HD came to an anti-climactic end early this week. (You can follow the history of the saga here.) After apparently getting a solution from corporate to the two HD service fees I was getting charged — one for each CableCARD in my TiVo — the celebration came to an abrupt halt last weekend when my second tuner lost all HD service. Again.
Sick and tired of it, I bypassed phone support altogether and filed another corporate complaint. This time, however, despite the corporate head office’s agreement with my position, the “corporate liaison officer” at our local Comcast department gave me a call to say there was nothing that can be done. In my area, she explained, the billing system requires that a separate HD service charge be assessed on each single-stream CableCARD. So, if I want HD service on both tuners of my DVR, I have to pay for it twice. And that’s that.
So I asked her, if Comcast would offer me a multi-stream CableCARD to replace my two single-stream cards, would I only pay one HD fee despite getting the exact same service? She said yes. Of course, Comcast still doesn’t have multi-stream CableCARDs here. As a result, I pay twice as much for the same service, because of their lack of equipment. Oh, that’s really nice; I’m so glad I could help. Is that extra money I’m paying you going to finance, say, acquisition of any fucking multi-stream CableCARDs, by any chance? (The woman did say that multi-stream cards were currently being tested and would be offered to us early next year, but I’ll believe that when I can hold one in my hands.)
As a consolation, the Comcast corporate liaison officer told me that they’re already crediting me for the extra $6.95 HD service charge by lowering our second CableCARD fee to $1.50, because it’s normally like 8 bucks. Huh? According to Comcast’s own CableCARD FAQ, the second card fee can be only “up to $2.05.” They’re saving me 55 cents, not $6.95. And if you check that same link, you’ll see that I wouldn’t even be paying a second card fee if I just had a multi-stream card. That’s another $1.50 I wouldn’t be paying if Comcast could offer current equipment.
But by this point I had had it. I’m sorry, I really had. I just can’t do this fucking song and dance anymore. I told the woman to just go ahead and restore service to my second CableCARD, and I’ll pay their extra $6.95 monthly fee. What else am I gonna do? At some point you have to recognize that it’s just seven fucking dollars. I will be hounding them next year to make sure I’m one of the first people to get a multi-stream card — assuming that wasn’t just a line of bull — but until then, I have more important things to deal with.
Speaking of which…I’m just getting started.
An Apple For Apple
“What the hell’s wrong with this computer now?” I groused this past Friday morning as my wife reported to me that her Dell laptop had suddenly lost connection to our wireless network…again. As I futzed around with the machine, I eventually realized that the cooling fan was running full-tilt and the keyboard felt like there was a five-alarm fire raging underneath it. To make a long story short, there was a runaway software process — the one that controls the wireless networking hardware — and the machine was cooking itself in its own juices. A reboot fixed it…for the time being.
“You know,” I said, “that machine is about ready to die.” I shake my head every time I say this, because it’s yet another reminder of what pieces of crap Dell makes these days. Perhaps saddest of all is the fact that the machine I just mentioned was a $2,000 Latitude business notebook which I bought for corporate use. (Or as close as my one-man company comes to “corporate,” at least.) And my wife is only using it now because the Dell Inspiron she had before that degraded to such a degree that it was unusable for anything but simple word processing. This has become a dilemma, naturally, because I no longer have a trustworthy business machine when I need to go portable. Fortunately, that need arises very rarely anymore.
Whenever Apple’s laptop does something stupid like this, the conversation always turns to the subject of replacement computers and what our options might be. We’ve been talking about it for over a year now, in fact, but there was never enough money to do anything about it — nor did there seem to be the “perfect machine” available for a reasonable price. My wife wanted a laptop that was small and light, but which had decent video and audio capabilities so she could watch her favorite Asian TV series and movies on it. For some time we were considering a Mac, but in order to get the kind of hardware we wanted, we’d have had to choose a MacBook Pro, and the cost was prohibitive.
But on Friday, after the Dell’s latest meltdown (literally), the puzzle pieces fell into place in a way they’d never done before. Only a week ago, Apple (the computer company) released an update to their entry-level polycarbonate MacBook, otherwise known as “the white plastic one,” which introduced a pretty healthy dedicated graphics array, a nice LED-backlit screen and a nicely-sized hard drive for $999. An update to the Mac operating system (called “Snow Leopard”) had just landed as well, which seemed to make it a good time to buy into the Mac platform. But none of this would have mattered all that much if it hadn’t been for Apple’s 12 months same-as-cash offer. You might say that sealed the deal.
We were only going to stop in the Apple store for a quick look on Friday night before we picked up dinner at P.F. Chang’s. Just, you know, to see what the new MacBooks looked like, how they handed, and whether we could apply for that financing offer in-store. But everything went so well that we walked out of the store with a brand new MacBook in hand, which I had the Apple guys upgrade with 4GB of RAM right then and there, plus the 3-year AppleCare plan…because my luck with laptops is oh, so awful.
Since then, we’ve been on quite a little adventure.
