Another Newbie Project: Tivo from work!

[Tony]

Hiya fellow Newbies,

What I am about to relate will strike most Tivo users as so strikingly obvious and trivial as to be barely worth mentioning at all. This is for the rest of us .

You probably know you can access your Tivo via your web browser at home (by entering the Tivo's IP into the browser's address bar). This is much easier if your Tivo has a static IP (search OzTivo to do that if you're currently using DHCP).

Its really easy to go one better and access it from anywhere. Its cool to be able to schedule recordings from work, or you could sink the ultimate geeky freethrow by operating your Tivo from a mobile device... it works pretty well from my Treo 650 phone, for example.

To do this you need to access the administration pages of your ADSL router (probably located at xxx.xxx.xxx.1 on your network, where the x's are your subnet... so if my Tivo's address is 192.168.0.10, the ADSL router admin page is probably accessible at 192.168.0.1). This needs to be done from inside the local network, rather than from another location via the internet.

Pop in your admin login and password... if you have never changed it the defaults might be "admin" and "admin" (in which case you really ought to change them to something better!).

Look for an option for Virtual Servers (might be under Security or similar). Look for an option like "Add". Setup External Port Start and External Port End to "8080", set Internal Port Start and Internal Port End to "80", Protocol to "TCP" and "Server IP Address" to your Tivo's address. Click "add" and you're away.

OK, now you need to know your ADSL connection's external IP address. You can find out by simply pointing your browser (from inside your LAN) to http://whatsmyip.org.

If you're with a nice ISP (ie. NOT Xtra) you'll probably have a static IP address that never or rarely changes... for example, mine at Orcon has been stable for years. If you are with Xtra you could buy your own domain name and subscribe to one of those dynamicDNS services... or, better still, switch now before you are assimilated!

Anyway, now that you have your external IP, just enter it from any web browser anywhere, adding ":8080" at the end (so if your IP is 84.27.120.74 enter "84.27.120.74:8080")... and there's your TivoWebPlus!

VERY soon you'll wonder how you ever lived without it...

Cheers,

Tony