What is the best way to connect to directv on demand?

I have a house pre-wired in wall for ethernet in each room. How to connect?

• This will be a lot to read, may get confusing but really it's not too complicated and I will be as detailed as possible: The first thing to know is that my internet (via wifi) works just fine. But here is the situation that has me baffled-- I have a house that has ethernet wired ports in each room, then there is a central hub in my closet. In the hub, I have a grey ethernet cord that is labeled 'service'. This service wire connects to a board that features 12 ethernet ports, 1 of which says 'in', 1 says 'security interface' and has a little nub in it, and the other 10 are not labeled. The grey wire is in the 'in' port. So I am left with 10 ports- port 3 of 10 has a (phone cord size) cord in it, connecting into the 'line' port on my Qwest modem/router. (Qwest set this all up for me, by the way). The modem/router is obviously plugged into the wall. Now- remaining loose in the hub are 9 ethernet cords- 5 blue, 4 green. Each one of these is written on in sharpie, and has a room label on it. 'Family, living room, kitchen, etc...'. So, pretty obvious, I simply found which cord corresponds to the room I am trying to use (family GREEN is one, family BLUE is another). These 2 wires correspond to the top port, and bottom port of a switch plate that is in my family room. Now- inside the closet hub I plugged family GREEN and family BLUE into the back of the ROUTER, ports 1 and 2 (of 4 available). Now- I went back to the wall- connected ethernet wires into the wall plate and then into the ethernet devices I am trying to use (slingbox and directv dvr). Neither are working. If I go to setup menu on dvr it says it cannot find a network, not getting an ip address. What confuses me, is that the slingbox red lights are both solid (which means there is a connection), and if I go back to the router ETH1 and ETH2 are lit up on the front, again implying that I have a valid connection. This isn't rocket science, but I must be doing something wrong. Are the family GREEN and family BLUE supposed to go into any of the 9 remaining ports that are open inside the closet hub? Because my thought was- let's say hypothetically I wanted to use every available wall jack in my house. There are 9 wall jacks total, but there are only 4 ports on the router. So this would not work. But, there are 9 ethernet ports open on the board in the closet. So I must need to use the ports in the closet, NOT on the router? If so, are these closet ports specific? Because (remember I have a phone like cord coming out of port 3, going into the 'line' port on my router/modem) I took this phone like cord out of port 3, plugged into port 4. and 5, and 6, 7, etc... and none of them would allow my wifi to work- the INT light goes off on the modem/router at that point. But when I plugged back into port 3 (where Qwest originally put it), INT lit back up and wifi worked again. So this makes me think that these 10 (9 remaining) ports are specific somehow? I know this was a lot to read. But please help, I think this is a very simple fix somehow.. End result I am looking for- continue to use my wifi on the computer (the ONE place in my house there is no wall jack lol), and connect my slingbox and my directv dvr to the wall jack in my family room so I can (have slingbox) and get On-Demand content for directv. Please if anyone can help who knows about networking I would really appreciate it! If needed, I can take pics of any part of the setup as well. Although my setup really is pretty simple... thanks in advance everyone.

• Answer:

  This is quite confusing. Perhaps you should post pictures of your setup at a networking forum. I'm thinking that the device in your closest is a switch, not a hub. If it's a hub forgive me, but a hub certainly shouldn't be used in this situation. A switch takes a packet coming in from the router and routes it to the specific computer it is supposed to go to, whereas a hub would send the packet to all the computers, leaving the computer to decide whether it should process it or not, which is inefficient. The hub in this case is used to extend the number of available Ethernet ports. Either way, a hub should work too. Connecting a cable from your router directly to a device should work if you've got an Internet connection via wi-fi. It's best to get that working before adding in a hub. I see you tried that with the DVR and you got an LED status signal indicating that the physical connection is there. Good. You also said that the box couldn't get an IP address. That could be a software problem, a DHCP problem, but probably not since your able to connect with a wireless device. A DHCP server provides the devices on your network with an IP address. If it's not running, you've got to set each device's IP manually. If you've got another computer with an network card, try connecting that directly to a port in the router. Also, remove the hub to make sure it's not causing the problem. If you still cannot obtain an IP address, and your TCP/IP settings to set to "obtain an IP address automatically," (see link below) then it's probably a DHCP problem, in which you need to configure your router using your wireless device by entering http://192.168.1.1 into your browser. Good luck!