Do you ever reinstall Sage or your sage server (playback lockups)?

[ybrew]

My sage has been really acting poorly for the past few weeks. Restarting the service or the server hasn't really helped. CPU & memory usage hasn't been high on the server at all, but playing back recordings have caused clients to lock up pretty frequently. This has happened on all of my clients (mediaMVPs, HD100, and PC clients).
I'm getting lockups whether I watch HD or SD recordings.

Also one of my tuners has been disappearing from sage a couple of times. (It doesn't appear to be a hardware issue, but i have removed that tuner and problems still persist)

My wiz.bin is only 45meg.

My plan is to simply move all the recordings I want to keep into an archive folder, remove sage completely and reinstall sage. I've had this setup running for over 2 years - probably longer - so a refresh is probably not a bad idea. Up until recently, sage was very stable and never had any of these problems.

(Yes, my recording drive is formatted w/ 64k clusters.)

If anyone has any other ideas I'm open to hear them, but doing the reinstall isn't that big of deal to me really. I'll back up my recording schedule so I can readd everything. This will give me an opportunity to start fresh again.

I wish I would've done this a few weeks ago, before the new TV season started, but I still have my DirecTV HD DVR to use while I get this fixed.

[stevech]

Sage service mode here on XP Pro runs 24x7 for years. Same Wiz.bin all the while.

Two PC clients, two MVPs.
Standard Def.
PC that is used for Sage and home automation/web server. Never email/web surfing.

I have upgraded PC speed/memory once by choice.

It works and I don't diddle with it. I do diddle/fiddle with PC client UI.
Sage 6.2

[Thomas Wischgol]

My setup is running for years as well without any significant issue. Reinstalling the whole thing seems a rather drastic approach and you may end up running into the same problems you are experiencing now if you do not get down to the actual issue.

I would probably start upgrading java to the most recent version first. You can also increase the java heap size since you are saying your server does not use a lot of memory, yet you seem to have numerous clients. It may be just running out of memory for java.

All in all, I would look at the server and its CPU/memory/network usage closely before making any drastic change.

Thomas

[Beefcake550]

My Sage Setup worked great for 1 year and then my HDHR stopped showing up as a tuner. Here's t he procedure I used to "reinstall" and everythign started workign again....it can't hurt to try this first.

1) Backed up Entire SageTV folder.
2) Completely uninstalled Sage and deleted the folder.
3) Reinstalled SageTV.
4) Stopped SageTV Service.
5) Applied the latest native recording patch.
6) ONLY EXTRACTED SageMC 6.3.9b_2, Jetty, Batch MetaData latest phoenix jar files (IN THIS ORDER).
7) copied over wiz.bin, wiz.bak and sage.properties. They retain all data for favorites and recordings and also settings.
8) Modified Jetty.properties for static IP address and port (I also run Sage Webserver).
8) Made sure SageTV service starts under Administrator and not LOCALSYSTEM and started SageTV service.
9) Fired up SageTV server. All settings present.
10) Applied the latest STV update. Installed SageMC 6.3.9b_2 and then BMT.
11) Went about configuring SageMC with the usual settings.
12) Everything is working fine.

Should take about 30 minutes to accomplish. Alos, I have to give props to "big_poppa_pump" for this detailed information that saved my ass.

[MalibuDave42]

Nice list... very helpful. Over the past year, I have made some manual tweaks to sage.properties. But I am concerned that there is a mess in there due to version changes, abandoned plugins , etc.

I see you moved your properties forward. Thoughts on my concern?

[Beefcake550]

Thoughts....it's worth trying with the backed up sage.properties while saving the new original as a backup.

You'll have to reapply any tweaks, channel listings, etc.

You'll waste very little time if it didn't work out for you.

[RayGannon]

Originally Posted by ybrew

playing back recordings have caused clients to lock up pretty frequently. This has happened on all of my clients (mediaMVPs, HD100, and PC clients).

I've recently experienced a similar problem. The System Event log on the server showed disk errors. I ran a utility to scan the drive and lock out bad sectors and that eliminated the lockups for a couple weeks. But the lockups are creeping back and there are new disk errors in the logs. Nothing to do now but replace the hard drive. I also experienced the HDHR's not being available but didn't explore that problem. It only happened a few times and seems to have resolved itself ?

[ybrew]

Originally Posted by RayGannon

I've recently experienced a similar problem. The System Event log on the server showed disk errors. I ran a utility to scan the drive and lock out bad sectors and that eliminated the lockups for a couple weeks. But the lockups are creeping back and there are new disk errors in the logs. Nothing to do now but replace the hard drive. I also experienced the HDHR's not being available but didn't explore that problem. It only happened a few times and seems to have resolved itself ?

The problem is something to do with my HD Homerun.
It might be an antenna, cabling or splitter issue. I'm working with silicon dust on it now.

yeah, a complete reinstall is drastic, but it gave me a good excuse to clean up tons of old recordings. I copied the important ones off, but it was a great way to reclaim a bunch of space.