I assume you have rebooted and FTP has not been restored.
Since you still have telnet access, you can use either joe or vi to look at your rc.sysinit.author file and see if you can spot the difference between your backup and the file on the TiVo.
Where did you make changes to the file? If on your PC, then you may have corrupted the file with ^M's. After looking at the file, if this is the case then type dos2unix rc.sysinit.author to fix the problem.
Peter.
Bookmarks