TiVo Trouble

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scottday

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Hi Everyone,

I have a TiVo PVR which gets its program guides from the internet thru a Linksys WRT54G3G router with a Vodafone data card plugged into it.

A couple months ago my tivo stopped retrieving program guide properly, but i thought it was my fault for messing around with it. I recently had to re-format it and was trying to set it up (see my posts with all my woes here) and all the files it downloads are corrupted.

If i download the same file on my PC its fine.

Now the funny thing is I took my tivo to a friend with ADSL and it worked no problem, which leads me to believe the problem is with vodacom.

Is there a proxy on voda that packets go through where they are being messed up? (all http traffic)

Any ideas would be appreciated!

Thanks, Scott.
 
The thing with techmology is you can never be too far ahead.

My suggestions would be to rather spend some extra money, and get a better toaster than your current one that is giving you these problems.

sorry I didn't read the whole thing through, only a word here and there...
 
scottday said:
Hi Everyone,

I have a TiVo PVR which gets its program guides from the internet thru a Linksys WRT54G3G router with a Vodafone data card plugged into it.

A couple months ago my tivo stopped retrieving program guide properly, but i thought it was my fault for messing around with it. I recently had to re-format it and was trying to set it up (see my posts with all my woes here) and all the files it downloads are corrupted.

If i download the same file on my PC its fine.

Now the funny thing is I took my tivo to a friend with ADSL and it worked no problem, which leads me to believe the problem is with vodacom.

Is there a proxy on voda that packets go through where they are being messed up? (all http traffic)

Any ideas would be appreciated!

Thanks, Scott.
Click to expand...

Which TCP port is the application using to download the data?
 
vodacom3g said:
Which TCP port is the application using to download the data?
Click to expand...
TiVo's use port 80 to download the data files and port 37 to sync the time with a ntp server.

You can take a look at the detailed discussion I had with Scott here. There are actually a number of TiVo users who connect without hassle using a Vodacom 3G connection, the problem seems to be that one of Vodacom's transparent proxies (cba-bluecoat-01) has cached a corrupt version of a file and keeps reserving Scott the same corrupt file.
 
TivoZA said:
TiVo's use port 80 to download the data files and port 37 to sync the time with a ntp server.

You can take a look at the detailed discussion I had with Scott here. There are actually a number of TiVo users who connect without hassle using a Vodacom 3G connection, the problem seems to be that one of Vodacom's transparent proxies (cba-bluecoat-01) has cached a corrupt version of a file and keeps reserving Scott the same corrupt file.
Click to expand...

Cool, will have it sorted.

Why I asked about the ports is that we sometimes see applications using well-known ports, but don't run the expected protocols over them. This then makes the firewalls very suspicious and they'll terminate the sessions.

In this case, what protocol is used over port 80 to download the files?
 
TivoZA said:
It's standard HTTP requests and responses. Even wget was failing to successfully download the file.
Click to expand...

That's why I'm wondering why the proxies don't like the data stream.

Won't you send me a PM with all the details on the problem, how to emulate the problem, etc. Write it in such a way, I can directly forward it to the engineers.
 
Hi Vodacom3G,

I dumped some packets, and the results are here

The problem seems to be that if a gzipped file is downloaded using wget it gets unzipped along the way (maybe for the benefit of mobile browsers who cant read gzipped webpages?), yet if the file is downloaded with firefox or ie it gets left alone.
 
scottday said:
The problem seems to be that if a gzipped file is downloaded using wget it gets unzipped along the way (maybe for the benefit of mobile browsers who cant read gzipped webpages?), yet if the file is downloaded with firefox or ie it gets left alone.
Click to expand...
In the HTTP request header, browsers contain the line "Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate" (wget requests don't contain this line). This setting tells the server that the client supports gzip encoding. Some web sites as well as some web applications gzip there content before passing it back to the user as this reduces the download size resulting in speedier page loads. When the server encodes the content before serving it to the caller, it adds the line "Content-Encoding: gzip" to the HTTP response header.

By default Apache servers also add the "Content-Encoding: gzip" when the file being downloaded has an extension *.gz, *.tgz or *.Z

Vodacom could quite rightly argue that the problem lies with Apache servers as according to HTTP/1.1 standards it's not technically correct for Apache to be adding the "Content-Encoding: gzip" when a compressed file is being served. However, given that nearly 50% of all web servers make use of Apache, it would be best for Vodacom to work around Apache.

The simple solution to the problem is when Vodacoms transparent proxy checks the HTTP response parameters, if the "Content-Encoding" is set to 'gzip' it should then check the "Content-Type" . If the Content-Type is set to "application/x-gzip" the transparent proxy should not decompress the content. This would still allow the transparent proxy to cater for compressed web pages as their content type is usually set to 'text/html' or 'text/plain'.
 
Last edited:
Thanks for all the info. This is a nice example of how communities such as myADSL and companies like VC can work together.

I've escalated and will let you know the status.
 
Ossum!

Thanks very much for the help Vodacom3G and TivoZA! You guys are awesome :D

Heres the WGET I did a few days ago:
C:\temp>wget http://tivoza.nanfo.com/static/headend/27000-42.slice.gz
--07:13:14-- http://tivoza.nanfo.com/static/headend/27000-42.slice.gz
=> `27000-42.slice.gz'
Connecting to tivoza.nanfo.com:80... connected!
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 26,506 [application/x-gzip]

0K .......... .......... ..... 100% @ 7.60 KB/s

07:13:21 (7.60 KB/s) - `27000-42.slice.gz' saved [26506/26506]
Click to expand...

And heres the same thing now:
C:\temp>wget http://tivoza.nanfo.com/static/headend/27000-42.slice.gz
--18:38:08-- http://tivoza.nanfo.com/static/headend/27000-42.slice.gz
=> `27000-42.slice.gz'
Connecting to tivoza.nanfo.com:80... connected!
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 6,377 [application/x-gzip]

0K ...... 100% @ 4.53 KB/s

18:38:12 (4.53 KB/s) - `27000-42.slice.gz' saved [6377/6377]
Click to expand...

Thanks again, guys!

I can just imagine what would have happened if I'd phoned customer care! :)
 
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