Our ReplayTVs are working again
by brian @ 15:59:44 - [perma-link]Turns out some of it was Operator Error, and some was a bizarre
firewall issue. (No pictures, and probably not an interesting read, but I needed to
make some notes somewhere I could find them later, and this seems
like as good a place as any.) The ReplayTV in our bedroom was failing to set its clock to the
Replay NTP server. This was actually the final problem, but the one
I'll most likely forget next time the IP address changes, or
something stupid like that. MacOSX Server was rejecting the NTP
replies, but an "Advanced" firewall rule: allow udp from 64.124.80.9 123 to 192.168.3.32/30 to get the response back in. I'm not quite sure why it was being
rejected. The time check is the first action in the net connect, and was
causing it to fail. I had switched to using WiRNS which seemed to fix the problem, since the
time sync and channel guide all happened within my network. WiRNS
worked OK for a while, but it fails on the ~weekly Comcast outtage,
or if someone looks at the pccard ethernet dongle the wrong way (I
don't think its a problem with WiRNS itself, but more with the laptop
it runs on). I hadn't discovered the NTP "bug" back then, so WiRNS
was sort of grabbing at straws, but it worked... for a while. The one (at least) of the disks went bad. I replaced the two with a
single 250G (down from 160+160, but still p-p-p-plenty), and it boots
up fine now. Probably heat damage, as the replay is on a shelf in
the rack, and the sides of the shelf were (this is brilliant!)
blocking the vents cut in the side of the replay case. The failure
probably happened in the summer due to the excess heat before we got
the small AC unit. It should be fine now as its much cooler in the
room, and the drive has better ventilation (pushed the unit so the
solid-side is against the shelf instead of the vent side). No longer using WiRNS, since it doesn't seem necessary. I wasn't
using any of the advanced features, so I don't think I'll miss it,
and now there's fewer things in the path to go wrong.
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