wireless MVP all togther now - success!

[dblaine2]

Hi all,

I thought I would share my adventures with a wMVP and how I got it to work. I'm running SageTV 6.2.10. I have a plain jane wireless G setup (currently in mixed mode since my laptop only has a B adapter). I have Windows firewall turned off on Sage server (although I'll probably turn it back on since I know the ports it needs from the documentation - SageTV 6.3 is great since I see this is all preconfigured during the install).

When I got my wMVP I was naive like everyone else and expected it to be plug-n-play. How very wrong!

I couldn't get it to associate and get an IP address first. I found I needed a firmware update on my AP (a netgear).

I booted my wMVP and went through the initial screens, pressed go, loading app and voila - black screen

So many reboots later I found that the wMVP would disassociate with my AP and I could no longer ping it. I thought that was odd.

I turned on debug_logging on the server and found some issues with TFTP timeouts.... This was a wild goose-chase. It seems these occur whether you have success or not.

After much digging in the forums, I gathered bits and pieces of information and tried it out to no avail. I did open a ticket with Sage on this but I eventually figured it out before they got back to me.

The information I got from the forums did lead me to my successful setup tho. That and my networking knowledge. I hoping having put it all together in one post that it will help someone.

One of the first tips everyone says is to disable MAC filtering on the AP. I really didn't like that plus I couldn't figure it out - I have the MAC printed on the underside of the wMVP. I really couldn't accept the fact that a little filtering would cause timeouts or delays that would stop the wMVP from working. Well I found out why. After the initial network setup and once the application is loaded, Sage changes the MVP's MAC address. I then added this new MAC to my filters and now it would stay associated but still couldn't ping it.

Well I have a Linux firewall with DHCP,etc for my network. I added a static reservation for both MAC's (the Hauppauge and the Sage one pointing to the same address).

Also I followed the advice to staticly set the IP in the Sage server. Under Sage.properties, I changed the lines to match my network:

miniserver/clients=MVP/<sage MAC>/<MVP IP>
miniserver/forced_server_ip=<sage server>
miniserver/gateway=<default gateway>

These settings greatly help if you have multiple interface on your Sage server.

I was feeling that I had this licked until I restarted the wMVP (always wait those agonizing 2 minutes or so) and again the screen was black.

I check arp tables (arp -a in Windows) and found that the Sage server was still caching the Hauppauge MAC for the device. I issued a arp -d <IP address> and voila, I got a Sage screen.

I'm currently watching Sage recordings wirelessly (did I mention my Sage server is also wireless). There is very little chop so far.

[matt91]

great. I gave up on mine, but still hope to use it wirelessly someday.

Out of curisoity, what is the distance between the MVP and the wireless AP? Any physical barriers in the way? I recall that MVP was somewhat sensitive to signal degredation.

Matt

[dblaine2]

Lots of stuff. I have a ranch house. AP is in the basement (don't ask). Sage server is in the back room which is on top of a slab not over the basement (I did have to add a hi-gain disk antenna cuz it is in a spot where the signal was a little weak. The MVP is in the front room. I get 3 bars pretty consistently with the MVP (as reported in the GUI).

I am in a subdivision and I have been using wireless for quite some time. Every Christmas I see new AP's popping up all around me I was using channel 1 for some time. I was noticing some slowness and occassional disconnects on my laptop for a few months. Well the MVP's screen showed me why. I had 4 of my neighbors all on channel 1. So I moved to channel 6. No one there yet.

I don't think the signal strength plays that big a part. As long as it is consistent.

[dblaine2]

BTW, this is another site that helps with understanding how the MVP boots and initializes:

http://www.mvpmc.org

And the specific wiki is:

http://mvpmc.wikispaces.com/H2+Linux+Boot+-+NEW

The other thing you can try is to act like a MVP and try to manually TFTP the dongle.bin to yourself. The MVP runs a TFTP server on a nonstandard port (16869). To test, you will need a Linux box or a third party TFTP client because the TFTP program that comes with Windows doesn't support changing the default TFTP port which is normally 69. So do the following:

tftp <pvr server ip> 16869
> get dongle.bin
> quit

It should be about 1.5 to 1.6 megs in size. Also you can run wireshark or tcpdump to see if you are getting a lot of retries and restarts during this transfer. This will lead you to possible network infrastructure problems.

It can't be understated that you should be running the latest firmware on your AP's. This might eliminate a lot of network oddities.