Emulator offline

[ehintz]

Before somebody starts asking... My webhost had a hardware failure, and as such the emulator (64.151.65.200) is currently offline. I don't know what the ETA is yet; since I don't know specifics of the failure I don't have any guesses... If it's a fan, ps, memory, etc it should be back pretty quick, if it's an HD then restoring will likely take more time. Will let ch'all know when I hear something.

[TerminalAddict]

need some free hosting

[zollymonsta]

need some free hosting

I have a cable modem

[brucer]

any word from your web host yet?

[ehintz]

Yo...

Responding in order here...

Thanks for offers of space, but I'm cool. Besides not paying for my current webhost, I've also got my own box at work on a citylink connection, so I'm not hurting for static IPs or hosting space.

The actual hardware failure was the hard drive. Worse, the admin is out of town; as Murphy's Law would have it the thing decided to die the day after he left for several days of vacation in Minnesota (from California). Everything was up and running within 24 hours on a backup box, but it's at .199, so the IP only nature of the Tivo bites us in the butt again. I checked into getting .200 forwarded to .199, but that would require a reboot of the Solaris based firewall, which he is quite understandably reluctant to do while half a continent away from the box. The earliest anything is likely to happen is Friday our time, though more likely Saturday, or perhaps even later. He may decide to keep things running on the backup box for a while, unknown at this point.

So, where does that leave us? Well, I see several options. First, the backup box does not have the emulator running on it at the moment. I could of course get it going, but frankly I don't see the point. As an IP address change is required, I personally think anybody doing so would be better served by going to the dev emulator. If you have network access to your Tivo, you have 2 options that I see: 1, change to the dev emulator, port 80 (this is documented elsewhere, I won't go into detail here), or 2, manually grab a slice or two and run via loadguide, until .200 comes back (if .200 gets pointed at .199, I will then go through getting the emulator running on it, for the folks on dial up or having other difficulties with changing tclient.conf).

For those who have trouble with modifying tclient.conf, I will get services going again as soon as possible on .200, but again this is unlikely to happen before Friday at the earliest. And again, while I have the ability to get it going either on .199 or on my citylink box, I don't see the point when the dev emulator is already there and running. If you don't want to wait, go there.

Future-wise, I think we should roll an nz image which uses DNS for guide data, this would solve the problem quite nicely. Tony was mentioning last night he may get another emulator, if he does and I have time I'm happy to look into creating a master image. I'm also happy to host it on my citylink server. Also, I'm contemplating just passing the emulator torch to the dev emulator crew. Having only 1 Tivo, I'm not on it, but I understand folks have been having good luck with it, and obviously the development is more active over there. I'm welcome to thoughts and comments on this issue. If this does happen, I will continue to keep .200 running for the foreseeable future; all I will do is note in the original emulator thread that .200 is deprecated and point to the newer install instructions.

Apologies for the outage folks. It's totally out of my control, and as luck would have it, it happened at about the worst time possible with the admin being on vacation. He has, by the way, been extremely helpful throughout this. He had to do some research on forwarding .200 (which he did very quickly), and also gave me root access on .199 within a few hours of the change over. But it's just bad luck I suppose...

[brucer]

Thanks ed.. I'll have to see if I remember how to use loadguide I would consider switching to the dev emulator but things have been so smooth for so long using your emulator I've got out of the habit of fiddling with the Tivo and I've basically managed to forget how it all works