[mythtv-users] Pixelation/Bad Recordings HDHR Prime -- I am at my wits end

[mythtv at phipps-hutton.freeserve.co.uk]

Quoting Greg Woods <greg at gregandeva.net>:

> On Wed, 2013-08-28 at 12:09 -0700, Gary Buhrmaster wrote:
>
>> With rare exceptions, the "management" address for all cable modems
>> is 192.168.100.1
>
> Certainly not so any more. I just got a new modem from Comcast, a DOCSIS
> 3 to replace the old DOCSIS 2. This modem is clearly designed as a "one
> size fits all" for all of their customers. It has jacks for the phone
> service. It has a wireless access point built in and four ethernet
> ports. It is hard-coded with an IP address of 10.0.0.1, and it insists
> on assigning 10.0.0/24 addresses to every machine in the house. The old
> dumb modem was really just a bridge; whatever machine you plugged in to
> the ethernet port got the public IP.

I'm working on the next generation chip for these boxes and you are  
right, they are designed to do everything the customer could possibly  
want. These chips are huge and take years to get to market so  
everything you can imagine is in there. It's basically a laptop on a  
chip with extra stuff thrown in (including a battery so you can make  
phone calls even if the power fails).

The customer is not you though, it's the cable company. These chips  
are pad limited so the customer gets to configure what peripherals are  
routed to pins on the chip and the firmware will power down unused  
parts.

The customer (remember it's not you) also gets to specify the router  
software and so it will have stuff in there that you may not want  
connected your home network.

>
> For me, this change sucked, because I have IP addresses hard-coded in
> all sorts of places (including MythTV of course).

MythTV is the only bit of software I know about that insists on IP  
addresses when it could use hostnames, bonkers!

> So I basically had to
> reprogram my Linux system that was acting as my router to account for
> this; it is attached to the "house" network, so that all the other
> machines in the house can keep their IPs. And then it is attached to the
> 10.0.0/24 net and sets its default route to 10.0.0.1. Thus I have
> another router between me and my public IP. I had to make a number of
> other changes to make this work (IPSEC tunnels and so forth; fortunately
> the Comcast box at least supports port forwarding).

That is a very good approach. I use the same but have ADSL instead of  
cable. The ADSL box is just a wifi access point (completely open and  
unsecured) and my home server connects to it and acts as a  
firewall/router for the other machines around the house. I don't use  
the ethernet ports on the ADSL box as every time we have a  
thunderstorm close by it blows the power supply plug on the ADSL  
router so I don't want any naughty electrons from the sky zooming  
around the ethernet wiring.

You're not paranoid, they really are out to get you (or in this case,  
they do treat your network as their own).

Hope this helps,
Tim.