The good and the bad

Well I got two shipments this week.  First thing I ordered was another hdhomerun.  I have been totally happy with the current hdhomerun I have so I ordered a second.  It came wed.  Did not have much time to hook up but I at least got it on the network.  Last night I finally got around to getting the static ip setup for it and setup in myth the way I wanted it.  I also upgraded both hdhomeruns to the latest firmware that came out yesterday.  Both are up and running now.  The original one has 2 cables from charter cable hooked to it and the new one has one cable from charter and one from the antenna I am working on in the garage attic.  I have heard rumors that charter will be getting simulcast going in our area some time in the next few months.  I have seen a few strange things with qam channels in the past 3 months so hopefully the rumors are true.  When they simulcast I will be able to record many more channels with the hdhomeruns.  Right now I have about 15 channels available.  Most of them are the network hd feeds.  I would love to get discovery hd (not hd theater) and a few other stations like the history channel and tlc, etc, in hd.

I also ordered a hdmi switch and 3 dvi to hdmi cables.  I am working on getting the mythfrontend, oppo dvd player and charter stb all hooked to our projector via the hdmi cable.  I found a switch on buy.com for 35 bucks with free shipping and no one complained that they had problems.  I hooked them up last night and it seems to do the job.  I just have to work on getting our logitech remote programed to control the switch.  That should make using the projector much easier.

The bad news is after all of that work last night, I woke up this morning to feed our dog and I normally check email real quick at that time.  The computer I use in the basement had not network connection.  Actually said cable dissconnected.  This can’t be good.  Well it was not.  The 16 port dell 10/100 switch that most things in our house plug in to was all lit up.  It is dead.  I was able to pull out an old 5 port 10/100 switch to help out.  I have most of the myth network plugged in to a 5 port gig switch, that is plugged in to a linksys wrt56gs that is running dd-wrt.  I also have the 5 port dlink switch plugged into the  wrt54gs.  I have 2 other dell 2300 wireless routers running dd-wrt in other areas of the house.  So between the extra 5 port dlink switch and the main wrt54gs, I was able to plug all active devices on the network in.  Now to find a good gig switch to replace the dead dell switch and get things back to normal.  Right now I am pretty much maxed out on ports so I hope another switch does not die on me.