Huge issues while away from home

General Discussion
1

Okay so I have a 2 tuner Tablo set up in my home in South Carolina. Half of the time I work in Indiana, away from home. Late last week, Thursday or Friday, I tried to watch a recorded show on my Nexus Player. It connected and played for about 8 minutes and then the feed just died. From then on my app still showed that it was connected to the Tablo, but It wouldn’t play any video, live or recorded. Not on my pc, not on my phone, not on my nexus player, not on my tablets, not on my fire tv stick. Some of my devices wouldn’t even connect to the Tablo, but the ones that would, would all get an error. So I had my dad go and push the reset button, now all my devices wont connect to my tablo at all, and I don’t even know if it’s recording any of my shows. I MISSED MY NFL GAME. this is not acceptable…

I’m paying you guys money so that I can watch and record my local shows and games, either while I’m at home or while I’m away. Besides these issues, my devices will randomly loose it’s ‘connection’. I have to wait a month or so before I’m home to connect my phone or my tablet to my home network before it sees my Tablo again. This is even more serious for my nexus player or my fire tv.

DO SOMETHING ABOUT THIS. I’ve been researching other ways of recording ota channels and streaming it through Plex if possible. The thing is I don’t want to. I love what Tablo brings to the table, and it’s gotten even better with it’s recent updates. But if I cant watch my shows half of the time, then I don’t know what else to do. Now XBox One can stream and record ota channels.

Let me connect my devices to my Tablo while I’m away from home, even if they have never been on my home network. Let me reset my Tablo remotely so I don’t have to drive 500 miles home, or call my dad. Damn you, just let me use my Tablo.

And Chromecast is still BROKEN for me. Now that it’s been half a week, I guess I’ll call my dad and ask him to go and hit the reset button again and hope it fixes it, and then hope one of my devices here is still synced with it. sigh…

So here’s the deal, I give you guys one more chance to set this straight. I really want you to, because I really like Tablo and want to use it. Otherwise I go and seek out other ways to record (and hopefully stream) my ota channels.

2

Oh to just have one problem for them to fix…I’m a little envious! But @theuser86 did have two pieces of good advice in a post when I was having the same problem. One was to reserve the IP address of Tablo on your router. Below is the other. Hoping one will be helpful.

1 Like
3

Thanks for passing that on for me, I guess I’ll have to wait until I’m home to change that.

4

As others have said, DHCP reservation for your Tablo is strongly encouraged. What kind of internet connection are you paying for? What router do you have? Is your Tablo connected wireless or wired? If wireless, 2.4 GHz or 5 GHz? All the pieces of your network setup will help us to diagnose your problem. BTW, my Tablo is connected wireless on the 5 GHz network, as is everything except the Rou LT, which is on 2.4 GHz because that is the only thing it supports.

5

My Tablo is wired. I haven’t even messed with UPnP or DHCP and I don’t know what my router setting is.

6

Most likely your Tablo got a new IP address since it uses DHCP. My new router defaulted to 2 hour lease for DHCP but I changed it to 24. I also set up DHCP Reservations. Guess that has to wait until you get home.

7

Can I set my router so that only holds the Tablo to a single IP address but allows all my other devices on my network to remain unchanged? I’m imagining toying with my router then my other devices around the house go haywire because I screwed with it.

8

Most routers allow for the administrative user to set a DHCP reservation.

I don’t want to be insulting, but it might be useful to define some terms. DHCP is the protocol that automatically gives out IP addresses on your local network. An IP address allows the devices on your network to find each other so they can communicate. An alternative to DHCP is to use static IP’s. This was common in the 70’s and 80’s, but in the 2010’s many devices do not have the ability to set a static IP. An alternative is to set a DHCP reservation. In effect, a DHCP reservation means that you are telling your router to “reserve” a single IP for a specific device. When your device gets on the network, it will always get that IP.

One facet of the DHCP protocol is that IP’s are leased to client devices, and as such they expire. When an DHCP lease expires, your device will ask for a new IP and usually will receive the same one it had previously. Note that I said “usually.” Sometimes you will get a different IP. This is what may be happening to you. The external connection to your Tablo requires a route to be in place, and firewall holes also in place to allow you to connect. When the IP of your Tablo changes, these routes and firewall rules are no longer valid. Again, a DHCP reservation should correct this.

Depending on your wide area network device (cable modem, DSL, dial-up, etc.) you may have a similar problem there too. I know my cable modem gets an IP via DHCP and occasionally gets a different IP address. This will break the Tablo remote connect just the same, and is entirely out of the control of the end user and Tablo. So far as I know, the only way to prevent the IP changing on the WAN side is to pay for a static IP on your service.

Good luck.

1 Like
9

Yes you can setup DHCP reservation only for one device say the Tablo and let the rest of them be randomly assigned IPs using the DHCP server.

10