Server Questions large enough

[phunny]

HI folks - I am thinking my server isn't fast enough or have enough power. Maybe someone who understands hardware better could help or direct me. I have a problem where my HD200 seems to get signal loss or times out. This happens when I have two or more HD200 active. When I have the one HD200 active watching TV its fine, when I go to my bedroom bring mine up it times out and resets it self. If I shut off the one downstairs the one up stairs works fine.

The server is dedicated to Sage the only process I have running at night (other than what MS turns on) is a back up at 4am. I do run Mcafee on it also.

I reran all cables and they are Cat 5E and tested. I am running 6.6.2.218. The HD200 are up to date also.

My server is a gateway running Vista 64 home. Its a DX4200-09 AMD Phenon Quad Core 1.80 GhZ
Mem Ram 4.00 GB

I checked the Nic its running at 100

I see no errors on the server, it doesn't lock up, nothing. But the HD200 keep timing out if more than one is active, they are all on a linksys router/wireless

I was thinking of going to windows 7 home 64 if that would help?

Any ideas, time for a new server? Is it the AMD processor? Thanks
Andy

[wrems]

It’s not your processor. The HD200’s do all the heavy lifting so the server is remanded to a streaming device. What are your sources? Do you have multiple HDHR’s on the same switch as the HD200’s and general internet traffic?

I know many are using GigE switches to prevent problems and provide enough bandwidth ubiquitously. Otherwise, consider running multiple networks and dedicating the HD200’s to their own NIC/switch.

[gplasky]

Enable debug log in Sage. It sounds like a network issue. Is your card a 100 or is it a GB set for 100? Set it to GB if you can. Start from there. A Windows upgrade won't really help your issue. Troubleshoot the issue first. Upgrade later if you want.

Gerry

[sic0048]

I concur with everyone so far. It definitely sounds like a network issue. There certainly isn't any problem with your CPU speed.

I'm just taking some guesses here, so please read this with a trial and error type mentality....

- I would reserve a IP address for each HD-200 via the router setup menus. Still set the HD-200 to find their own addresses (ie don't hard code the address in the HD-200), but the router will use the same IP address for each HD-200 always. That way you don't get a situation where the IP addresses get changed due to a power failure, reboot, etc.

- change router network ports that the HD-200 are plugged into. Perhaps one is not functioning 100%.

Good luck. These things can be tricky to track down.

[phunny]

[QUOTE=wrems;389357]It’s not your processor. The HD200’s do all the heavy lifting so the server is remanded to a streaming device. What are your sources? Do you have multiple HDHR’s on the same switch as the HD200’s and general internet traffic?

I like your idea of isolating the HD200's from he rest of my network, I do have one person doing gaming but otherwise its general internet traffic and voice (VOIP). This weekend I am going to get a Gige router and put the HD200's plus the server on its own switch, will that help? Or does it need to be in its own network meaning its own router?

Thanks

[gplasky]

Originally Posted by phunny

IThis weekend I am going to get a Gige router and put the HD200's plus the server on its own switch, will that help? Or does it need to be in its own network meaning its own router?

Thanks

The server and HD200s on its own switch will be the best arrangement.

Gerry

[phunny]

As of this morning the server and HD200 are on a GIG Netgear switch. I took one connection from the linksys router to it, then took out the three connections into the switch. One from the router and three others, one server + 2 hd200. We will see what happens, I just know the furtherest connection which is my bedroom the HD200 is great and responding between shows under recorded shows is faster by a lot, was this to be expected? I wonder if that was the problem. Ill report back in a day to let everyone know. Thanks for your input

[davephan]

Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't see how setting the NIC to 1 gig will help, since the HD-200 media extenders are limited to 100 megs. I think the HDHomerun units are also limited to 100 megs. If network traffic is the issue, and you have a HDHomerun, then I think it would help to put the HDHomerun on a separate NIC with a crossover cable, or a another switch if you have more than one HDHomerun. The last time I checked, I think my network load for one HDHomerun was about 18 - 20%. I don't think a separate switch for the HD200s would help, unless that is done to partition main network bandwidth consuming devices.

On my next SageTV computer build, I plan to setup my HDHomerun on a separate NIC with a crossover cable, just to get that network load of my home network system, even though I don't see any network contention problems now.

Another possible cause is your switch might be getting flaky. My router/switches seem to only last a few years. Recently, my Linksys router/switch would intermittently drop connectivity. I replaced the router/switch, and the problem went away.

Dave

[phunny]

Thanks Dave I am going to try that next, that is replacing the router, I dont understand but one of my HD200 in my bedroom the furtherest run is still dropping. Thanks

[davephan]

Before replacing the router, you might try switching around the cables so they use different ports on the router. Sometimes ports can go bad or become unreliable.

Dave

[Savage1701]

FWIW, I think others are correct.

I use GbE with a good quality 48-port Netgear smart switch, which falls between Layer 1 and Layer 2 switches. I'm not sure which model of Netgear you are using, but no doubt about it, the $50 8-port one at Staples won't match a higher-end (even just 8-port) switch that has better fabric and switching capacity.

I also use a "prosumer" type router, a HotBrick unit, with a Xincom as a backup. Again, no $50 router from the local office supply stores.

As far as NIC teaming is concerned, I've never had good luck with that. I've never had jumbo frames work well either. But a good GbE network ought to handle 700+ Mb/s before it saturates, so a couple measly HD data streams should hardly touch its abilities. Even 100Mb/s Fast ethernet ought be able to handle a couple HD200's without breaking a sweat. I can't imagine you don't have GbE NIC's.

I don't know your chipset either, but some Nvidia and AMD ones have drive troubles. Also, if your NIC is stealing bandwidth from the PCI bus that could cause problems with PCI or USB based devices and your NIC on that same PCI bus. I am guessing here as I know nothing about your board or its chipset. I would try and make sure my onboard NIC is using an PCI express lane, that any USB tuners were on a NEC chipset based x1 add-in card, and that as many of my tuner cards were x1 as possible.

You might also check the settings on you NIC to make sure it is appropriately negotiating speed, TCP/IP send/receive offloading and buffer size, and other such things.

One other thought - is your system running any defragmentation, indexing, etc. on these drives while streaming? I think you said you had Macafee. That could bring things to a halt. I hate that program and won't let it into my systems ever. It's like a vine that chokes off a tree. But again, I make sure indexing and such are off on my drives, and certainly defragging. It may also be worth setting your video storage drives to 64K block size. Smaller blocks only matter on the system drive, especially in the case of an SSD. It's hard to know without knowing more about your system specs.

One thing I will throw out - I have tried using Norton Ghost 14 and backing up to a spare hard drive on my Sage server since it's on all the time. It drove the Sage server (running XP 32-bit SP2) absolutely bonkers. The Ghost client was running 32-bit Vista. It was as though it was constantly making sure the Sage drive was "on" or something. It literally shut the Sage server down and made the drive in the Sage server click. This was a brand-new drive replaced twice because I thought it had a hardware defect. Ooops.

Doubtfult that has much to do with your 4 AM backups, but my problems happened at night and I traced it back to Vista-based clients trying to back up.

I'm probably one of the few on here that has not experienced networking issues with the HD200's. I don't know why, but I think the others are right. Your HD200's are doing the hard work of decoding and presenting the signal to your television. Your network ought to be able to just stream a couple of HD200's some 20-30Mb/s or 2.5-3.5 MB/s data streams.

Just some thoughts FWIW. Best of luck to you.

[phunny]

OK to everyone here thanks!, I bought this morning a Netgear Wirless N router. I can't see buying commercial for my house, but I smile saying with the money and time it might of been worth it.

Now I have two networks, one with the family computers, wireless, printers all contained. The second network with is the netgear only has the Sage server, and the two hd200 clients in it. The netgear is a GIGe router which I thought would be best. Even though I am learning from here the hD200 can only do 100 but my server can do gigE

Now my dilemma is my printer and sharing of disks.

1) From another PC I would rip to the Sage Tv directory now in a different network I can't map the drives, One is 198.192.10.x the other is 198.192.20.x. My printer is a network printer with a NIC and USB Are there USB wireless devices so I can share it or a USB type of router so I can share it?

2) Is there away for me to map drives or share files via USB like a cross over cable.

So far my girlfriend and kids are happy this morning, no outages, sage works and sponge bob is watchable on two tvs now, lucky for me

Again any ideas on how to share the HP printer and files would be appreciated. Ill report back in a day if the two network idea worked.

Thanks

[davephan]

Originally Posted by phunny

Now I have two networks, one with the family computers, wireless, printers all contained. The second network with is the netgear only has the Sage server, and the two hd200 clients in it. Now my dilemma is my printer and sharing of disks. Thanks

You could add a wireless NIC for your SageTV computer. Then you will be able to print and map drives with the SageTV computer.

If you haven't done so already, you should also secure the wireless network. WEP encryption is worthless, since it can be broken in less then 1 minute. You need WPA or WPA-2 encryption. There is a podcast that will tell you how to do it. Check out "Security Now" episode 13. A transcript is also available for each show, so you can listen to the podcast and read it.

http://www.grc.com/securitynow.htm

Dave

[phunny]

Dave, Do you know can I use a bridge to do this or will traffic start to flow again to both networks?

right now its working great 24 hours late and sage and all the HD200 working perfect.

Thanks for your help

[davephan]

Originally Posted by phunny

Dave, Do you know can I use a bridge to do this or will traffic start to flow again to both networks?

right now its working great 24 hours late and sage and all the HD200 working perfect.

Thanks for your help

That's great news that your system is working perfectly! It's probably a good time to take a system image too.

I have never tried using a wireless router in 'bridge' mode, so I don't know the answer to that question. Although you need to make sure your wireless network is secure from your neighbors and the 'war drivers'.

Dave

[phunny]

FYI I thought id make one update: Since breaking the sage TV network onto its own router no problems. Been since Saturday, no reboots, no resetting of the HD200's. I guess I got to a point of too many pcs in the house, combination of gaming and kids always on got me to a saturation point. But now I am happy.

Thanks to everyone