[mythtv-users] I got my Ceton InfiniTV 4 working in 0.24-fixes (compiled with custom code)

[Ronald Frazier]

On Thu, Jul 21, 2011 at 6:53 AM, Tom Bongiorno <two.bits.11 at gmail.com> wrote:
> I can't remember, but did you get
> the web interface to be accessible from an external PC?

Yes, I did. At first, the quickest way to get it working was just to
use an SSH tunnel between the machines. So if you want to access it
from your windows box, you open an SSH tunnel (using putty, for
example) from any port on the windows box (lets say port 1234), and
then on the remote end it connects to the ceton's web server at
192.168.200.1 port 80. Then on your windows box. you'd open your web
browser to http://localhost:1234 and it would bring up the ceton's web
interface. This works great, with the one restriction being that you
always have to make sure your tunnel is setup before you access it.

The above method works fine, and it's what I'd recommend you do at
first, at least until everything is setup up, you have your cablecard,
and the pairing and authorization is complete. As you recall from an
earlier post, it took a bit of time to get the cablecard working, and
once it got working, we weren't absolutely sure what step actually did
the trick. So at least until the pairing is complete, I'd suggest
toying with the configuration as little as possible in case that was
related to any of the problems I had.

The better way to access it remotely is to setup network bridging on
your linux box. Basically, you have your primary network card (eth0)
and then you have the virtual network created by the ceton driver
(ctn0). Previously (without bridging) you would have set it up so that
you have an IP address on eth0 (say 192.168.0.100) and an IP address
on ctn0 (say 192.168.200.100). When you setup bridging, it will create
a third network device (br0) and you will get your 192.168.0.100
address on the br0 device. You will not actually have an IP address on
eth0 or ctn0 anymore (since you won't access either of them
directly...you get to them through the bridge).

The one caveat to this is that, since 192.168.0.* and 192.168.200.*
are completely different subnets (since systems by default have a /24
subnet mask....255.255.255.0) devices on the 2 subnets cannot
communicate with each other, even with the bridging in place. The
typically way to solve this would be to simply change all the devices
to use a /16 subnet mask....255.255.0.0. You do that and it should all
instantly work. However, I tried that, and it didn't work with the
Ceton. I brought in the help of my university's senior network admin.
At first he looked at the configuration, and said everything is setup
correctly. We spent quite a bit of time systematically testing it, and
eventually came to the conclusion that the ceton doesn't respect the
subnet mask properly when you change it. He said that in his
experience, this is a very common problem...he's seen lots of hardware
that doesn't properly work with anything except a /24 subnet mask.

So after trying to get that working for the longest time, we gave up,
went into the ceton, manually set the IP address so that it was on the
192.168.0.* subnet, and instantly the bridging started working.

So to sum it up (since the above was a bit long winded):

Quick way: download putty, configure a tunnel, connect to the server,
and point your web browser at the tunnel....takes about 60 second to
setup

Better way: Connect to the ceton website and assign it a static IP
address on your main subnet, install the bridge-utils package,
configure br0 with your IP address (or set it up to use DHCP), setup
eth0 and br0 so that they have use static IP configuration (but you
don't actually assign them an IP), reboot, and everything should work.

For reference, here's the contents of my /etc/network/interfaces (not
sure what the equivalent way to set this up through the gui would be):

auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

allow-hotplug eth0
iface eth0 inet static

allow-hotplug ctn0
iface ctn0 inet static

auto br0
iface br0 inet static
        address 192.168.0.100
        netmask 255.255.0.0
        network 192.168.0.0
        broadcast 192.168.255.255
        gateway 192.168.0.1
        dns-nameservers 192.168.0.1
        bridge_ports eth0 ctn0

-- 
Ron Frazier