Thursday, December 24, 2009

Slingbox Solo.  Some successes and some failures.

Slingbox classic was having some problems lately.  For some reason the IR would quit working.  Though my wife was able to resolve the problem by unplugging the IR connector and reinserting it this solution was not a long term viable alternative.  The IR was failing more than once a day and I had to wait until my wife got home from work to fix the classic.

So I got the Slingbox Solo.  The box is a little smaller than the classic but bulkier.  The hardware installation was little different than the classic.  But the software installation was awful.  First off, I could not paste passwords into the fields.  Huh?  I use generated passwords from Password Safe and these are not easy to type.  So I had to revert to my own strong password which is not going to be as strong because it is not random enough.  They really should allow for the user to paste into a text field. 

The "setup for internet viewing" seemed to do nothing but set slingbox to a fixed IP and never updated any of my router settings.  So I finally figured out how to reset the Solo to use the IP address my classic used.  Once that was done things worked pretty straight away.  I was able to verify the iPhone Slingplayer was able to access the Solo from across the Internets.  So looks like I'm all set for my next upcoming business trips. 

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