Jason Zerbe’s logbook

For those of you who don’t know about DirecTV2PC … check it out! It’s pretty awesome (if you have a Windows PC and a DirecTV DVR).

Here is what I did to get DirecTV2PC working in my Local Area Network with two HR20 set top boxes.

1. Go to http://www.directv.com/directv2pc and click the Download Beta button on the right side of the page
2. When the pop-up comes up, click Continue to Beta download
3. Click Download Now to download the DirecTV PC Playback Advisor application to see if you pc is up to running the DirecTV2PC application.  Once you finish the download run the installation and then run the application. The application sometimes falsely identifies your system specs. As long as your PC is running Windows XP with Service Pack 2 or Windows Vista with Service Pack 1, a 2Ghz processor, and 512MB ram you should be good to go.
4. If you PC passes the application or you believe it should be able to handle the application according to the rules of thumb  I laid out in the previous step, then enter your name and email on the page and click the Submit button. The DirecTV2PC application download will then start. It is a 34 MB file, but it may take awhile to download. The average speed I rolled for the download was 20kb/sec. It took about 30 minutes to download … atrocious! Once your download completes, you will be sent an activation code to the email you provided earlier.
5. Run the installer and fill out the various fields.
6. Now run the application, for the application to properly activate you will need to:
   • be connected to the Internet
   • open TCP port 443 (incoming and outgoing) on your router’s firewall
   • open your PC’s firewall for the DirecTV2PC application (you should be automatically prompted by Windows)
7. If the application still does not activate properly, that means that your ISP’s DNS servers have not updated Cyberlink’s new IPv4 address for the A record activation.cyberlink.com. (Or Cyberlink is jerking around with their IPv4 addresses again … bah!)
   Here is what you do:
   add exactly what is in quotes: “203.73.94.101 activation.cyberlink.com”
   to the file “c:/windows/system32/drivers/etc/hosts” (if your main hard disk drive is lettered c”)
8. Enjoy your DVR’s movies!

Hardware, Software, Windows Cyberlink, DirecTV

I never thought that I would be calling some computer cases sexy, but well … they are pretty sexy. The curves on these babies put out by the Chinease, CFI group, are very fashionable. I found their website from an article on an all-in-one frakenstein-ish creation. It contains a fileserver, router and switiching equipment, all in one SCSI case. Now that could get pretty hot. Speaking of curves, there is also an open source mobile phone venture start-up, openmoko. Yes, you heard right, an OPEN SOURCE PHONE! They allow you to load your own custom firware and software, and even support opening up the case and getting down and ditry with the mo-bo! Lastly I never would have guessed that there was a major datacenter five miles from where I lived in El Segundo, California. Man, and I missed it!

Hardware, Internet, Linux cfi group

It turns out that the only problem with my wiring was the heads. I couldn’t use my custom wiring schema for Gigabit Ethernet purposes. I changed the wiring for my Gigabit connections to the TIA/EIA 568B standard. Now the only limitation on my Gigabit speed is the processor and bus speed of my GX240 Optiplex. I’m pulling 170 - 200Mbps out of the thing to my Debian based file server. You might find the following wiring diagrams helpful:

Hardware my lan