LinksysByCisco
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Linksys Media Extenders suddenly stop working, did Cisco pull the plug?
It was the halcyon summer of 2009. The Hubble Space Telescope was fixed, Helio Castroneves won the Indy 500, Somali pirates were really doing their thing, and Linksys decided it was time to pull the plug on its DMA2100 and DMA2200 Media Center Extenders. Production was ceased and that was that... or so we thought. Now we're hearing dozens of reports that those extenders mysteriously stopped working over the past few days, and indeed a thread over at The Green Button is full of hundreds rightfully disgruntled users. Thanks to a lot of investigations by members it's been determined that the boxes are trying to dial home to an address that no longer exists. Naturally this is causing wild speculation about DRM checks and the boxes being remotely disabled, but for now there are some manual work-arounds, including configuring your router to explicitly block any traffic from the Extender or simply assign an invalid gateway. This seems to work for many, but not for all. We've reached out to get an official word from Cisco on what's up here, but until we hear back feel free to post your most alluring conspiracy theories in comments below. Update: Still no official response from Cisco/Linksys, but Matt was kind enough to send us the official work-around that users who have reported the issue are told to use. We've included that for you below. Update 2: Cisco responds! [Thanks to everyone who sent this in]
Linksys by Cisco PLTK300 Powerline kit is pretty, sluggish
And to think, this here box had so much promise. At first glance, it's easy to fall head over heels with the PLTK300 Powerline box. After all, it features a four-port adapter that easily manages game consoles, Blu-ray players, AV receivers, etc., and passes those signals along your home network via power wiring. The rub? It's based on the older 85Mbps standard and not the fresher, speedier 200Mbps protocol. In other words, you may see dropped frames and the like if trying to push too much HD through here at once. Ah well, at least that news makes the Asia-only availability that much easier to live with.Update: So, these seem to be shipping now in the US. Huzzah! [Thanks, Dave!]
