waiting on another hd200

[Hunter69]

Ok so I have slowly been expanding my sage capabilities. I have had a sage server with a hd200 for quite awhile. My setup now consists of the following expanded capabilities

I have two hdpvr's attached to two of the cable companies hd cable boxes (for expanded hdtv lineup

1 hdhr

So now I want to expand to another hd200. I ordered it. What should I do to my server to prepare for another hd200 to added?

My end plan is to centralize my cable and distribute it with dvr capabilities throughout my house, plus have dvd/blu-ray and musical capabilities. This next step will be to completely replace the cable company dvr that we are apying monthly fees to have. My wife primarily uses the cable company dvr and I am about to introduce her to sage. She has used my setup in a limited amount.

[Fuzzy]

in all honesty, there is pretty much nothing you will need to do to the server. When you get the HD200, plug it into the network, and begin enjoying it. You have ethernet run to the new viewing location, right?

[paulbeers]

Maybe increase your java heap size? Beyond that, I've got nothing.....

[Hunter69]

yes I have ethernet to it.

I have thinking about increasing the Java heap size, just not sure how. I guess I will have to research that.

[davephan]

Centralizing the cable boxes is a good way to save money, if your wife will accept it. I need have cable boxes on two of our main TVs, since my wife wants to watch 'live' cable TV without SageTV. Other times, she will watch SageTV. Channel surfing is pretty slow with SageTV.

If you do end up centralizing your cable boxes, then you should run your SageTV computer 'headless' to reduce the probability that problems occur to the extenders from non-SageTV computer use.

Centralizing the cable boxes will increase you and your wife's dependency on the SageTV computer. You should take periodic disk images of the SageTV computer's boot drive, and test the recovery, by recovering with the disk images. You will need to be able to recover the SageTV quickly with a 'known good' image, if the SageTV computer stops working. The disk image recovery can't solve every type of failure, but it will drastically reduce your downtime if the SageTV computer fails, and the image recovery is successful.

Dave

[Hunter69]

Originally Posted by davephan

Centralizing the cable boxes is a good way to save money, if your wife will accept it. I need have cable boxes on two of our main TVs, since my wife wants to watch 'live' cable TV without SageTV. Other times, she will watch SageTV. Channel surfing is pretty slow with SageTV.

If you do end up centralizing your cable boxes, then you should run your SageTV computer 'headless' to reduce the probability that problems occur to the extenders from non-SageTV computer use.

Centralizing the cable boxes will increase you and your wife's dependency on the SageTV computer. You should take periodic disk images of the SageTV computer's boot drive, and test the recovery, by recovering with the disk images. You will need to be able to recover the SageTV quickly with a 'known good' image, if the SageTV computer stops working. The disk image recovery can't solve every type of failure, but it will drastically reduce your downtime if the SageTV computer fails, and the image recovery is successful.

I just upped my java heap size to 1024 and made some suggested changes to album cache to prepare for the 2nd hd200,

Dave

Thanks for this info. I have not addressed the imaging of the system disk yet but I am in the process of getting a UPS. Channel surfing with the hdhr is near normal but the hdpvr is slow. So I learned how to set the hdhr as the preferrable tuner. I have not had the hdhr for very long, I am seeing how reliable it is. I had one incident where I could not get a picture for live tv and it was due to the hdhr needing cycled. So this will be sort of a test with the wife till she tells me she likes it.

Do you have any disk imaging suggestion (reliable fast software) that is compatible with WHS??

[davephan]

Originally Posted by Hunter69

Do you have any disk imaging suggestion (reliable fast software) that is compatible with WHS??

I use Ghost 9.0 to image and recover my Windows XP SageTV computer. Each time I take an image, I recover with the image to verify the image is valid. If the recovery ever failed, I would have to recover back to the last known good image. I haven't had a failed recovery since I quit using DVDs to store the image files. Always store the image files on hard drives, not optical media.

I do not run WHS because I have not heard of a verified way to image the WHS operating system. From what I have heard so far is, WHS has 'tombstone' files that can change frequently, and may cause the restoration after the image to fail, rendering the whole imaging plan useless. The fact that there isn't a proven way to recover WHS, without requiring a manual re-installation/scratch build, is the reason I haven't switched to WHS yet. WHS is good for backing up other systems, but it seems to fall short in backing up itself!

I think that it might be possible to image WHS with an imaging product that creates the image, and recovers the image while the operating system is shut down. One disk imaging software product that can take an image and recover an image when the operating system while Windows is shut down is called PING, Partition Image is Not Ghost. PING is a free software package. PING will image Windows and Linux.

You could test PING by taking an image of the operating system and 'toombstones' drives with PING. Then make some changes, or allow changes to occur. Then try recovering with PING. When you recover to a point-in-time in the past, I don't know how WHS will deal with files that WHS stored after the point-in-time. Maybe the files will be stored in the 'pool', but WHS will not know about them. Maybe WHS will discover the files in the 'pool' after the point-in-time.

If WHS cannot be recovered without a scratch build, then maybe the best way to build the SageTV system is with two computers. One computer running Windows XP running SageTV, and a WHS computer for the video file storage. The SageTV computer then could be easily recovered with an image. The WHS computer could be recovered with a scratch build. If SageTV, Java, and everything else was not installed on the WHS computer, then less changes would be done to the WHS computer (most computer failures are linked to changes), reducing the chance that the system would fail.

I really like the redunancy of WHS and the ability of WHS to easily expand disk space. However, the lack of a proven method to quickly and easily recover WHS has prevented me from using it. If you test an image recovery of WHS, be prepared to rebuild the system from scratch if the recovery fails. Let us know the result of the PING image recovery, if you choose to test it.

Dave

[Hunter69]

I got the UPS installed, now I have to come up with a good recovery strategy for my server. I would love to image the system drive but from my reading it does not sound to reliable yet. So I guess I will need to come up with a way to quickly recover the server and sagetv in its current state. I am not so sure the server itself will be that big of an issue (at most I will need to reinstall a blu-ray driver, hdhr and two hdpvrs. I guess the biggest issue is properly backing up sage to maintain my settings etc. Any suggestions?