Hack 52 Getting Telnet to Your Ethernet-Enabled TiVo

Now that our Series 1 TiVo is using Ethernet [Hack #49] and is online, let's get a telnet prompt on it.

It's time to forget that primitive Bash over serial [Hack #30] connection you set up to bootstrap command-line access to your TiVo. While it will remain useful as a backup, let's face it: that connection is slow and being tied to a host PC is more hand holding than your TiVo needs. This is the age of ubiquitous networking, after all.

But before you say goodbye to that old standby, you'll use it one last time to turn on telnet, remote login capabilities from anywhere on the network. Using your serial prompt, edit Section 3.11 your rc.sysinit to accept telnet connections by adding the following line at the end:

tnlited 23 /bin/bash -login &

Here, I'm being a little lazy and using the echo command to append the line to rc.sysinit without need of a text editor:

bash-2.02# mount -o remount,rw /
bash-2.02# echo 'tnlited 23 /bin/bash -login &' >> /etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit
bash-2.02# mount -o remount,ro /

Restart your TiVo and wait for it to pass the "A few more moments please..." message on your television set. Once all appears to be up and running, use your favorite telnet application to connect to the IP address of your TiVo [Hack #51], and you're in like Flynn.

There is absolutely no security when telnetting to your TiVo. Not only are all your commands flowing over the network in the clear, but TiVo doesn't even ask you for a username and password. If, for some reason, your home network isn't behind some sort of firewall, whether provided by your broadband modem or otherwise, you'll be the wiser for putting some sort of firewall in place�not just for your TiVo, but for the safety of all your computers. Until your network is reasonably protected, you won't want to open your TiVo to telnet or any other kind of network connection.