This is the sixth of seven parts of the story of how I killed my answering machine. How complicated can it be to replace a simple little device with something a little more geeky? About 17 months, $500 and countless hours – that’s how complicated.

Part VI: Ethernot

My TurboNet card still wasn’t working. I got to know all the various log files on the TiVo drive, looking for anything that would indicate what was wrong. Again trying to eliminate some pieces, I brought the TiVo into the study and connected it directly into my router. Ding! The light came on for TurboNet and things looked happy. I set the TiVo’s phone number to “,#401” which caused it to “dial-up” over the ethernet connection and the update completed. It was fast too.

This seemed to indicate that the wireless bridge I bought was the problem. I looked closer at the specs for the TurboNet and the wireless bridge and I thought I figured out why. The bridge was 10 base-T ethernet only and the TurboNet was well, turbo: 100 base-T according to its web page. Aha!

I posted a message on the support board about my discovery. Realizing that my wireless bridge wasn’t going to work, I decided to buy another one. I could always sell the bridge at work.

Since I knew my Linksys WRT54G router worked fine, I made one last trip to Fry’s to get another one, which can be set up to work as a bridge. It would also be faster and if I got more devices that needed networking in the living room, it would be easier to plug them in as well.

I went and grabbed a router but it wasn’t the same price as before. It was $10 more. The guy at the desk said that I could get the rebate at the counter, but when I went there they said there wasn’t one. Knowing I could get it on Amazon for cheaper, I left, ending my streak of positive Fry’s experiences. I went home and ordered it from Amazon. The trip wasn’t completely unproductive; I did place a cache.

Soon after I got a response to my question on the SiliconDust forum. The TurboNet was 10 AND 100 BaseT, so it should have worked with bridge. He said I might want to try a crossover cable. Of course I thought this suggestion was silly. I was using the cable that came with the bridge. Why wouldn’t they give you a crossover cable if that’s what you needed? And it worked with my laptop, so that couldn’t be it.

That was it. The guy on the forum said that my laptop probably had an auto-sensing ethernet card, which means it didn’t need a crossover cable; it would detect if the wires were crossed and cross them over internally. I went back to my big bag of cables and pulled out a crossover cable. The green light came on. It worked. I’m a dope.

Next, Part VII: The Damage