The Slingbox might be one of the coolest gadgets that I own. When I originally bought it, Jen wondered why I needed to spend the money on such a device. “Need” is probably a strong word for the situation, but she has finally seen the light as it has given us greater flexibility in our travels over the last year. I haven’t had to go out of my way to find a sports bar or anything like that. All I had to do was get my laptop in reach of a wifi connection and I could watch whatever sporting event I needed to see. Again, “need” is a strong word, but I digress.
The only problem with the Slingbox is getting it set up. I am not sure exactly how I did it the first time, except that it wasn’t working even though I thought I had all the settings done correctly. Then all of a sudden, my friend who was acting as off-site tester, told me that it magically started working. And it worked perfectly from that point on.
That is until I decided to buy a new, faster router; the D-Link DIR-655 Extreme N Wireless Router. Sure, it sounds like a code-named hate group from some earlier time, but it is a heck of a lot faster than the router I was using before. For one, it is a gigabit router for all the computers that are physically connected to it. This means it is 10 times faster than the 10/100 router that I was using before. On top of that, it uses a new protocol on the wireless side to boost up connections that have compatible wireless network cards capable of running the draft-N protocol.
(NOTE: If you hate complicated network-y geek conversation, you will want to tune out now)
What this really meant was a re-install of all the complex internet setup and routing that goes on in my network, including, but not limited to my Slingbox.
The Slingbox is particularly difficult to get routed to the outside world for whatever reason. To make things even more difficult, the d-Link software which is used to administer features and security on the router is more complex than the software I was used to on my old Linksys. D-Link has “enhanced” their menus in an attempt to make things more user-friendly and as a result I find it much more difficult to navigate through the menus to figure out what I want to do. It has four main menu categories; Setup, Advanced, Tools, Status, and Support. Depending on which item you click, there will be some options in the main window and then different sub-menus down the left-hand side. The result is a multi-layer maze of options, some of which are seemingly redundant at first glance. Instead of just having “port-forwarding” options, the D-Link also has a “virtual server” option which has a menu that looks identical to port forwarding, even if they do slightly different things. Hell, they may do drastically different things, but I just don’t know anything about virtual servers.
Anyway, I got to port forwarding and realized that I hadn’t set a static internal IP address for my Slingbox yet.
Apparently that is under Setup and Network Settings. Once there, it was quite easy to select the Slingbox and have the MAC address associated with a static IP. But that isn’t where the process ends.
Back over to the Advanced Tab and the Port Forwarding option. I know where it is now, but is there any reason that port forwarding couldn’t be considered part of setup or some of the things in setup couldn’t be considered Advanced?
Anyway, back over there to select the special port number that will be mapped directly to the new static IP address that I assigned to the Slingbox.
Now time to test the Slingbox. Should be all good. Unfortunately, the only testing you can do from inside the house is on the same local area network that the Slingbox is on. Even if the streaming of content works there, it doesn’t mean that it is going to work once you try to load up the player from some other outside location.
Today, I tested it when I got to work and no dice. I log into GoToMyPC to check things out and play with it for a little while. Still nothing. Then I finally figure out that I had to go into the Slingbox setup itself to make sure that the Slingbox knows it is mapped to this new IP address on the network. Sure enough, I had it mapped to the old address and as soon as I matched it up with the static IP that I had the MAC assigned to, it worked.
So the Slingbox is back up and running until the next time I change routers, or this one breaks. Of course my one friend who was using it out in another part of the world will have to call me to get the new settings, but those are the breaks, I guess. Still, it is great to have the option to load up the Slingbox whenever I can’t make it to a location showing blacked out sporting events or local broadcasts that are unavailable nationally.
Now, we will see if I can somehow justify the HD Slingbox to Jen.
