Diagnosing Recording problems

Hi folks,
I am using the THR22 DirecTivo with my DirecTV and NFL sunday ticket.

Unfortunately, more often than not, football just fails to record.

Obviously this happens when I'm not home to diagnose the problem.

When a show fails to record, It is removed from the Todo list, and nothing shows up. Settings and messages doesn't show me any errors.

There MUST be a way to see what happened. If so, the AT&T/DirecTV folks have no clue.

What is the most common way to look for problems that occurred in the past?

If there is no way to do this with TiVO (and we're obviously talking about a slightly older version of TiVO here)...

Some ideas:
1) I hear this is no long possible, but can I SSH or telnet in? If so I could look for messages in /var/log
2) Is there any chance they left a syslog server configured? If so I can make a local DNS server point to my own linux box so I can start looking at logs
3) Is there some way I can log into my AT&T account to see what happened?
4) Maybe someone on the forum has figured out a way to diagnose that most of the support Reps have no clue about.

Thanks for any and all help.