# V70 insights



## pldoolittle (May 2, 2002)

Note: This will be a little long, so I'm going to break it up into chunks.

I just went through the v70 troubles well documented here. Today when working with support* I stumbled upon some info that may be helpful.

The equipment:
Room B
- Tivo Premiere 2 Tuner Series 4
- Tivo Mini (Room B)
- Belkin F4G0500 5 port 10/100 hub 
Room A
- Tivo Roamio 4 tuner series 5 
- Cisco WRT54G router 
Wiring Closet
- Netgear 24x1gbps switch 
- Cisco WRT54G Router

Tried:
- Rebooting
- 2x force connects on all
- Powercycle on all incl network
- Rename, 2x force, reboot (all)
- Letting sit on for 12 hours after all of the above.

What worked:
- MRV between the Premiere and Roamio

What did not work:
- Tivo Mini (Saw both devices, got downloads, v70 error)

*First person refused to help as soon as "switch" was mentioned. Asked for an escalation and got a helpful person.


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## pldoolittle (May 2, 2002)

My Setup

Wiring Closet
Internet --- ARRIS Cable Modem --- Cisco WRT54G (firewall) --- Netgear 24 port switch

Network
- Flat, no VLANs. One class C address space.
- DHCP provided by Cisco WRT54G (firewall)
- DNS supplied by Win2K3 server forwarding to 8.8.8.8

Room B
- Tivo Premiere (to 24 port switch)
- Belkin F4G0500 5 port switch (to 24 port switch)
- Tivo Mini (to 5 port switch)
- Media player (to 5 port switch)

Room A
- Cisco WRT54G configured as a switch/AP (to 24 port switch)
- Tivo Roamio (to WRT54G switch)
- xBox (to WRT54G switch)
- Verizon Femtocell (to WRT54G switch)


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## pldoolittle (May 2, 2002)

When the Premiere was direct connected to the 24 port, it could MRV. The mini was connected to the Belkin 5 port and connected fine, but got a v70 error on all devices. 

The tech suggested that we try swapping ethernet connections between the Mini and the Premiere. When we did that, the mini instantly cleared the "No circle" from the Roamio and allowed setup to proceed. At the same time the Premiere lost MRV to the Roamio in Room A, but (oddly) now sees itself in "Devices" and can browse itself there.

Switching back (mini in 5 port, Premiere in 24 port), the Mini stayed authorized and would MRV from the 2 tuner Premiere. It would not see the Roamio in the "devices", but this may be normal as the Now Showing on the mini was from the Roamio and the Roamio name was listed at the top of the Now Showing list. When live TV was selected the mini took a tuner from the Roamio as expected. 

Summary: Tivo's insistence that the devices not connect to a "switch" appears to be half-truth/half-misunderstanding. Apparently their activation "beacon" (and possible MRV) relies on some layer 2 protocols that do not pass between layered/linked switches* well. However when connected to the same common device (a "router" in their notes) all syncs up and works well. Once sync'd, the live TV function continues to function so apparently it uses a different protocol than MRV. My guess is that it is likely operating at layer 3.

It is also worth noting that the problem centers around the Belkin 5 port mini-switch downstream from the core switch, as devices connected to the WRT54G had no problems with MRV before or after activation.

* probably a limitation of inexpensive SOHO gear lacking a true uplink/trunk configuration


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## travelinjoe (Nov 28, 2003)

Thanks for this solution. I read this and didn't believe it could be the case. 
Tivo Bolt, Tivo roamio, 2 x Tivo mini vox. Bolt and Roamio can see each other, xfer shows, etc. 
Minis can't see the main bolt, and device status on the tivo says they are disconnected ( they are not).

my main switch is a netgear JGS524E - 24 port gige managed switch. I've checked and there are no port restrictions / traffic management set on it.

so just out the effort to eliminate possibilities - i plugged the tivos and the minis into a dlink 8 port gige switch (DGS-1008G ) - and instantly the minis were able to find the bolt and connect. 

I'm tempted to wireshark the dlink and try to see what's going on but this seems a little crazy that some undocumented network traffic type is preventing the devices from connecting. 

Tivo has long been a fixture in my house but while this wasn't working we started using the apps on the apple tv ( hulu trial, abc and hbo ) - really opened my eyes to how good streaming is these days. I'm disappointed that Tivo hasn't done a better job documenting the troubleshooting steps (beyond 'trying' another network switch). It's all working now but looking at what is possible with the apps is now something I'll take a deeper dive into.


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## Time_Lord (Jun 4, 2012)

pldoolittle said:


> Summary: Tivo's insistence that the devices not connect to a "switch" appears to be half-truth/half-misunderstanding. Apparently their activation "beacon" (and possible MRV) relies on some layer 2 protocols that do not pass between layered/linked switches* well. However when connected to the same common device (a "router" in their notes) all syncs up and works well. Once sync'd, the live TV function continues to function so apparently it uses a different protocol than MRV. My guess is that it is likely operating at layer 3.


There should be no reason you can't daisy chain switches together, although you need to be careful as to how many layers deep of daisy chaining you go, but 1 layer is a non issue.

The Tivo uses two different advertisements to find other devices.
1) a broadcast packet on port 2190 (broadcast is always UDP) that contains information on the unit, eg software, TSN, name etc once per minute
2) a multicast (multicast is always UDP) packet on port 5353 to address 224.0.0.251, this is mDNS (Multicast DNS) and simply advertises all the units on your network

I have not checked to see if the advertisement is different during an initial startup. It is important to note that the broadcast cannot go across a Layer 3 boundaries (eg a router), a multicast can with some specialized configuration. Make sure your WRT54G router in room A is only being used as a switch and that nothing is connected to the "WAN" port of this router.

Also keep in mind that if your 24 port switch is manageable make sure that it is not configured to squash the multicast or broadcast traffic, possibly check IGMP snooping?



travelinjoe said:


> I'm tempted to wireshark the dlink and try to see what's going on but this seems a little crazy that some undocumented network traffic type is preventing the devices from connecting.


Problem with using Wireshark where everything is connected to switches, you need to be able to "span" or mirror ports in order to see all the traffic, although multicast and broadcast should be allowed through to all ports and seen on all ports, but unicast traffic would not be seen without the ability to span a port.


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