Showing posts with label pioneer sc-25. Show all posts
Showing posts with label pioneer sc-25. Show all posts

Saturday, October 31, 2009

network sniffing with a MacBook as intermediary

I bought a new network aware AV receiver for my home theatre the other week:
Pioneer SC-25

And I was trying to figure out how the Pioneer was communicating over the internet. Since there is no console to the receiver, the only way I could figure out what is was doing was to capture packets as they entered and exited the ethernet port of the device. Unfortunately, I didn't have a hub. A hub would allow me to connect the receiver and a laptop with Wireshark running in order to see the packets in and out of the receiver:
http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/lanwan/lanwan-howto/30305-packet-captures-and-network-devices

What to do?

Then I remembered that my MacBook has an Internet Sharing feature. You can share your Internet connection from either the AirPort or the ethernet port on the MacBook:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?path=Mac/10.5/en/8156.html

The Internet connection on my MacBook is provided by wireless, so theoretically, I should be able to:
1) share my MacBook's internet connection
2) connect the receiver to the ethernet port on the laptop for the shared 'net connection
3) have Wireshark sniff the ethernet port as the receiver's packets pass through it

After enabling Internet Sharing on the ethernet port, I connected the ethernet cable coming from the receiver to the MacBook's ethernet port. I fired up Wireshark, started streaming music from the Pioneer and sure enough, there were packets flying through the Interface monitor in Wireshark! Very cool.


Note: one problem you might see when you first start using Wireshark is this error:
/dev/bpf0: Permission denied

Just do give read permissions to that ethernet device:
chmod 644 /dev/bpf0

cheers,
TAG

Monday, October 26, 2009

new home theatre, courtesy of Pioneer SC-25

As I had a ten year old Denon 3801, it was high time I replaced my AVR with one with more modern features. Based on its feature set as compared to comparable Denon's or Onkyos, I concluded that the SC-25 was my best choice. I put together this short video of the SC-25 setup process for those who might be interested.


enjoy,
sodo
Feel free to drop me a line or ask me a question.