Bringing a Boxee Box back from the dead
So last weekend I found my old Boxee Box on a shelf in the basement and I decided to try and get it back up and running. In my troubleshooting efforts, I decided to go ahead and do a Factory Reset – BIG MISTAKE! The following guide outlines the steps I took to bring this cute little toy back from the dead!
DO NOT FACTORY RESET!
Panic. Ok, so you didn’t listen to #1. Your firmware is something like 0.9xxxx and your Boxee is now stuck at a screen saying that the LAN connection and/or wireless connection isn’t working. At this point, you are pretty much screwed. During the Boxee boot sequence, it calls out to a specific set of URLs (*.ping.boxee.tv). Samsung took the Boxee servers offline this past year and so no heartbeat is ever established. The only way around this is to get those URLs to respond to establish a connection.
Upgrade your firmware to 1.5.xxxx. I decided that the first thing to do was to get things up to a point where I could get the hacks installed. Steps are:
Download the latest Boxee Box firmware.Here is one potential link: https://public-nicholasserra.s3.amazonaws.com/web/boxee.iso .The downloaded file will be named boxee.iso, and that name must be retained.
Copy the boxee.iso file to a thumb drive formatted FAT32 or NTFS. Make sure to properly eject the thumb drive after copying the file.
Power down the Boxee Box.
Power on the Boxee Box by pressing and holding the power button for 5-10 seconds. The Boxee Box will then reboot with the logo in orange.
After the Recovery Menu appears, connect your thumb drive to the Boxee Box, wait 2 seconds, choose Reset all Settings and then select Upgrade from USB from the menu, and follow on-screen instructions.
Spoof the network. This step is a bit harder especially if you are not very technically savvy. Essentially you need an IP address of a server that will give that heartbeat response to the Boxee when it pings the specific URLs. When you get this IP, you choose Manual Configuration on your Boxee at that startup screen and enter the IP as the DNS server. Here are the steps I followed:
Run Docker. This step involves creating an account, downloading and installing and finally running Docker.
Launch the Docker image of a small DNS server created by HazWard
docker run \
-d \
--name dnsmasq \
-p 53:53/udp \
-p 5380:8080 \
-p 80:80 \
--log-opt "max-size=100m" \
-e "HTTP_USER=boxee" \
-e "HTTP_PASS=box" \
-e "EXTERNAL_IP=<set IP of running host>" \
--restart always \
hazward/boxee-server
Make sure to change the EXTERNAL_IP value to the IP of the machine that will be running the server. On my network, this was 192.168.1.2. A web interface for the DNS server will be running at http://EXTERNAL_IP:5380 and the credentials will be HTTP_USER and HTTP_PASS.
NOTE: The backslashes are meant to allow the various args to run on new lines. If you have trouble, just smoosh everything onto one line:
docker run -d --name dnsmasq -p 53:53/udp -p 5380:8080 -p 80:80 --log-opt "max-size=100m" -e "HTTP_USER=boxee" -e "HTTP_PASS=box" -e "EXTERNAL_IP=192.168.1.2" --restart always hazward/boxee-server
If you don’t know Docker, (or otherwise don’t want to use this approach) you can also use the public server hosted by Nicholas Serra to achieve the same result. Here is a link to his blog where he describes the setup.
Manually Network setup. Now that you have a DNS server running, select the option to “manually configure the network” on your Boxee. This will move you to a screen where you can enter IP, Subnet, Gateway, and DNS. Hopefully you know enough about your network to enter these values. Mine were something like:
· IP – 192.168.1.16
· Subnet Mask – 255.255.255.0
· Gateway - 192.168.1.0
· DNS – 192.168.1.2 (notice how this matches above!!!)
Create User Profile. When you save this configuration, you should magically get past the networking step and now you can create a User Profile. Create a new profile and save it. Restart the Boxee for good measure!
Hack your Boxee. The final step to really have control over the Boxee is to install the latest hack. This can be found here: https://github.com/cigamit/boxeehack with complete and very well written instructions.
<OPTIONAL> Install Kodi. I decided I wanted to install Kodi as a media player. There are some good instructions out there including:
https://www.reddit.com/r/boxee/comments/62uyq4/how_to_get_kodi_to_run_on_boxee_box_hacks/
https://github.com/quasar1/boxeebox-xbmc
https://famicoman.com/2016/03/07/rehacking-a-boxee-box/
Links and References - None of this is original content. I merely wanted to document what I did using all the great work of others. Thanks to everyone who posts to help with problems like these,. Here are a bunch of links that I used in figuring this all out.
https://www.reddit.com/r/boxee/comments/ci4ugj/boxee_cloned_server_updates_working_server/
https://www.reddit.com/r/boxee/comments/c08y0e/dont_throw_your_boxee_boxes_away_just_yet/
https://www.reddit.com/r/boxee/comments/62uyq4/how_to_get_kodi_to_run_on_boxee_box_hacks/
http://tech.nickserra.com/2019/12/16/boxee-box-cant-connect-to-internet-fix-cloned-boxee-services/
https://famicoman.com/2016/03/07/rehacking-a-boxee-box/
https://gitlab.com/HazWard/boxee-server
https://github.com/quasar1/boxeebox-xbmc
https://github.com/nicholasserra/boxee-server-light/
https://public-nicholasserra.s3.amazonaws.com/web/boxee.iso
https://www.reddit.com/r/boxee/comments/eg07zi/bringing_a_boxee_box_back_from_the_dead/
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